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  Once over the pass, we turned north up the valley. After twenty miles, the three slick-ship companies separated, to land at different places around the target. Our gunship company split up in three groups to cover us.

  While the formation let down for the approach, I looked ahead to find the LZ. No trees or foothills this time; it was all cleared land, dry rice paddies, and sandy, weed-patched fields. It was difficult to believe that a company of VC could be hidden there.

  The lead ships got closer, and their door gunners started firing. Their tracers plunged to the earth at nothing I could see.

  About a mile from a solitary tree and a hundred feet off the ground, I-saw two figures tearing across the sandy field toward the tree. More than thirty machine guns were trying to hit them.

  When I was close enough to see the sand puffing up at their heels, one of them dropped his rifle and turned around to get it. He looked up frantically. The sky was filled with tracers, all coming at him. As he reached for his rifle, the sand boiled at his feet and he continued down, falling through the turmoil of bullets. He must have been dead before he hit the ground.

  His terrified companion was still running for his life. As we closed in, there were even more machine guns following him, chattering. I watched amazed as the bullets churned all around the running man. “Give up!” I yelled. “Give up, you dumb motherfucker!” Realizing that he would not make it to the tree, he dove for the only cover available, a shallow depression in the sand. Door gunners all around us were pulverizing the ground around him, but Leese had not given our gunners permission to fire. That dumb fucking gook, the bravest man I had ever seen, rolled over with his rifle aimed high to take on our entire air-assault battalion, machine guns blazing. He might have got off one or two shots before he was torn to pieces.

  The final score for that mission? Those two VC. The intelligence branch must have read their maps upside down. Connors suggested that the intelligence branch was getting its information from smuggled Chinese fortune cookies.

  In a letter I wrote to Patience on October 15, I told about Nate getting shot down for his second time. He and Kaiser were on an ass-and-trash mission along Route 19 when a lucky shot into the engine brought them down. Riker and Gotler immediately followed them down to the road and picked them up. Before they took off, they stripped the downed Huey of its radios and guns to keep them out of the VC’s growing collection of American supplies. Nate looked proud, puffing on his pipe as he told us about his adventure. Once again, he had walked away from near disaster. Everybody agreed that it might have been a different story if the other ship hadn’t been with him. I resolved to fly higher in the secure area.

  I also mentioned—or rather complained bitterly—that I had been bumped from a planned one-day rest and recuperation (R&R) to Saigon. The plan was that everybody would get a chance to visit Saigon at least once when a ship needed work that the Cav couldn’t handle. By rotating the job of flying these ships to the big depot at Ton Son Nhut air base in Saigon, everyone could make a trip sometime during his tour. These trips lasted anywhere from one to three days.

  My name had come up for the next trip. A one-day R&R. I was overjoyed and spent a couple of hours gathering my stuff together, getting Marston to trim my hair, and compiling a shopping list of requests from my tent. I felt great about getting away from the Cav, even if for only one day.

  The plan changed. The trip was extended to three days. It was felt by somebody that it was a waste to give a three-day trip to a brand-new warrant officer, so the ship was taken instead by two captains. Farris was angry about the sudden change in crews. Williams, the man I had impressed by shooting out the omni-gauge, probably made the decision.

  While the two captains took off, I grabbed an ax and joined the work crew on the Golf Course. My opinion of our company commander was deteriorating.

  ———

  On October 17 I was declared right-seat qualified by Williams. Right-seat qualified meant that I was now considered skilled enough in the Huey and air-assault operations to be an aircraft commander. A regular old salt, almost. For the rest of the day I didn’t even notice the mud as I slogged around the company area.

  Another maintenance R&R trip to Saigon came up, and this time Riker and I were scheduled to go. A three-day trip.

  Rather than fly directly to Saigon, over 250 miles of VC territory in a sick Huey, we first flew to Qui Nhon and turned south to fly down the coast to Vung Tau. From there it was only twenty miles to the big city.

  We flew at 5000 feet, where the air was cool and the bullets couldn’t reach, a beautiful two-and-a-half-hour flight. We were both pretty excited about visiting Saigon, country boys coming in to see the big time. The crew chief and gunner were also happy. We all cracked jokes over the intercom and talked about what we were going to do. At times like this, even the Cav seemed okay.

  As we cruised low level over the city toward Ton Son Nhut, Saigon was a sea of tin roofs that stretched for miles. People below us waved as we soared only a hundred feet above their huts and gardens.

  “See that?” I said. “See those people waving?”

  “What about it?” said Riker.

  “They are obviously happy to see us. No doubt they’ve heard all about us working and fighting our asses off in the highlands. No doubt they’ll have a reception of happy, grateful people waiting for us when we arrive.”

  “No doubt,” Riker said, shaking his head.

  We left the Huey at the maintenance depot, jumped into a cab, and ogled the scenery on the way into town. The driver was obviously an ex-kamikaze pilot. His technique for passing cars was to lay on the horn, swing out into the other lane, and persevere. Etiquette demanded that under no circumstances would he change his mind.

  We got a hotel room that featured peeling paint, no windows, and a john in the shower stall. This was fine compared to the moldy tents and dirt floors at tent city.

  We rushed through quick showers and changed into wrinkled civilian clothes. No uniforms off duty. I had a pair of tan cotton pants and a green checkered shirt. A loose-fitting, wrinkled white shirt emphasized Len’s scrawny build and freckled complexion. It was the first time we had worn anything but fatigues for two months. We looked it, too.

  “Shall we go see what we can see?” I said.

  “We shall,” said Len.

  I opened the door as a young second lieutenant walked by. He stopped, and without saying anything, he leaned against the door jamb and looked around inside.

  “Pretty bad room,” he said.

  “You don’t like the hotel?” I asked.

  “No, it’s not that.” He smiled. “I live here. I’ve just never seen this room before. Really tacky.”

  “Seems fine to me,” Riker defended.

  “Well, maybe for a one-nighter, or for the enlisted. But it’s not the kind of place I would normally buy.”

  “Buy?” I asked.

  “Yeah. I buy and lease hotels and apartment buildings for the army. I’m a real-estate officer.”

  “Real-estate officer?” I was amazed.

  “Sure,” he said. “Somebody has to do it….You guys from the Cav?”

  I wondered if he noticed the horse patches on our fatigues inside.

  “Yeah, how did you know?” asked Riker.

  “I checked the register.” He grinned. “I bet you guys are really seeing some action up there in the highlands. We hear all about the Cav down here. It’s really boring here. Never any action.”

  He was dressed in starched jungle fatigues and polished jungle boots. We didn’t have either of these, because there was a shortage. My regular boots were rotting off my feet, so I was looking for a new pair.

  “Can you buy fatigues and boots in Saigon?” I asked.

  “Buy?” He looked at me, puzzled. “I guess so, but my stuff is issue. Don’t you all have jungle gear? The Cav?” He paused. “Come downstairs to my room and I’ll show you something. You’re on the way out, aren’t you?”

 
Down in his room, we saw twelve sets of jungle fatigues carefully spaced on his clothes rod, as neat as a closet in officer’s candidate school. Two pairs of jungle boots sat on the floor beneath them.

  “You were issued all this stuff?” My feelings were obvious.

  “Sure. As far as I know, we have more than we need. I don’t understand why you don’t have this stuff at the Cav. I’m sure you’ll get it soon.” He smiled, but neither of us smiled back. “Anyway, don’t you think this room is nicer than the one you got? Does yours have a john or a squat hole?”

  “It’s got a john in the shower stall,” I said.

  “Well, that’s something. I hate to use those damn squat holes. Don’t you?” he asked. I hadn’t used one yet, so I didn’t know.

  “Well,” I said, “we’re used to using outside latrines.”

  “Yeah,” Riker interrupted, “we shit in sawed-off 55-gallon oil drums. When they’re full, we burn the shit with jet fuel. Smells bad.”

  “Damn.” He was impressed. “You guys are really roughing it. I can’t tell you how much I envy you. Action. Really getting out there and doing it.” He paused. “Well,” he continued, “somebody has to be down here doing the bullshit.”

  “Assholes better not send any more of us to Saigon!” Len exclaimed outside the hotel. “If they do, the word about this fake fucking shortage is going to get back to the suckers!”

  “That’s right!” I said. “They’ll have division-wide riots, and everybody will quit.” I started laughing. “I know I’ll quit. Hell, I’ll quit right now just to save the trouble of going back and starting the riots.”

  “Me too!” yelled Riker. “I quit!” We were both laughing. Vietnamese passed by us on the sidewalk, smiling nervously at what I’m sure they thought were two drunken, possibly berserk Americans. Exhilaration overcame us, and as we hurried to the street corner where the pedicabs waited, we sang, “We quit because we quit, because we quit, because we quit…” until we sat down in the back of one of the bicycle-powered cabs.

  Len gave the driver a piece of paper with the name of the hotel where we could find an officers’ club. I think it was the International Hotel. The young pedicab operator looked at the paper and nodded.

  He pedaled tirelessly, his ass never once touching the bicycle seat. “Must be in great shape,” I said. “Probably a VC by night.” A blue U.S. Air Force bus plowed by. It had heavy wire screens installed over each window.

  “So you can’t toss a grenade inside,” said Riker.

  Suddenly I realized how easy it would be for someone to run up beside us and toss one in the cab seat. It gave me a case of nerves. Too many people to guard against. I was about ready to bail out of this Oriental express when the VC up front turned around, smiling. We had stopped. Obviously he had read my mind.

  “Da wa no hai,”he said, or something like that. I translated it as “Ah so, jai, you die now!” Actually, it meant that we had arrived. Len and I got out and paid him. He took our money and pedaled off, to buy some ammo, no doubt.

  We passed ARVN MPs at the front door. After a leisurely elevator ride we found ourselves under the darkening sky on the penthouse patio at the top of the hotel. Parts of the hotel served as billets for American officers stationed here, and this roof garden was part of their club. The beautiful Saigon night spread out beyond the low parapet.

  The bar served any drink you could name, made with American booze, for a quarter. Civilians and soldiers mixed with round-eyed ladies from somewhere. They drank heavily and talked loudly. Their voices made me nervous. Weren’t they worried that they might draw fire with their boisterousness?

  As the bourbon flowed into my bloodstream, I began to warm to the occasion. Drunk enough to relax and be hungry, Riker and I got a table overlooking the city. We had rare sirloin and baked potatoes with sour cream served with a huge tossed salad of crispy fresh lettuce and juicy tomatoes that might have been grown on a farm near my hometown in Florida.

  The events of the rest of the night are lost to me. I know that both of us drank too much. Actually, it must have been me who drank too much, because Riker at least knew how to get back to the room.

  Starting very late the next morning, we went to the navy BX to pick up stuff for the guys back at camp. The Saigon warriors had a complete department store. The stuff for sale here was actually better and cheaper than the merchandise sold at PXs in America—Nikon cameras for $150. A Roberts tape recorder cost $120. There were clothes, tools, canned food, books, even cases of Kotex.

  Riker suggested that evening that we go back to the restaurant I had enjoyed so much last night.

  “Last night?” I didn’t know what he was talking about.

  “Sure. Don’t you remember the snails you had?”

  “I have never eaten snails,” I announced. But I was beginning to have a vague recollection.

  “Well, you had about three dozen last night. Besides, there’s a girl there who loves you.”

  “A girl? Hey, listen, Len, I’m a married man.”

  “So am I.” He grinned. “But I still get horny away from home. Besides, you don’t have to fuck ‘em, you know. It’s nice to just sit and talk to a girl for a change.”

  After dinner that evening, I began to feel very sick. By midnight I was doubled over. Len took me to the navy hospital, where they treated me for dysentery. I spent the remaining twenty-four hours of the vacation sick in bed.

  The following morning I sat in our Huey with a case of the blahs. I rode as a front-seat passenger while Len flew and I watched with growing apprehension the tin roofs thinning into rice paddies and jungles as we headed back to the highlands and the Cav.

  On October 22 a news magazine ran a boldly optimistic cover story about how things were coming along in Vietnam. The magazine came out while Len and I were in Saigon. Everybody read it. The article summarized for us and the folks back home just how well things in Vietnam were going. Three months before, the Viet Cong had been ready to move in for the kill, and South Vietnam was ready to quit.

  But now, South Vietnam was brimming over with confidence, nearly giddy with pride and power, an incredible change from the summer before. The reason for this remarkable turnabout was one of the fastest and largest military expansions in the history of warfare. Once again I read about how we had chopped the brush and stumps with machetes so that our choppers would not cause dust storms on the heliport. So that we wouldn’t get the feeling that we were training for jobs with the South Vietnam Parks Department, they mentioned that 2500 of us were fighting in Happy Valley.

  The article closed with the reproval that it was the Communists who picked South Vietnam as the first domino in the string that was Southeast Asia. Now, it claimed, they were having second thoughts. The United States had met the challenge, and not just South Vietnam but all of Southeast Asia would eventually be strengthened by the remarkable and still-growing presence of American know-how, hardware, and lives. Even the mundane act of troops unloading at Qui Nhon was transformed in the article into waves of tough, scrappy GIs pouring ashore from fleets of troopships.

  The article did not say a word about our effectiveness. With all our mobility, the VC still called the shots. We fought on their terms.

  The slant of the article created an impression, and the impression was hard to forget. Even I believed that it must be only the Cav that was having problems, that things in general were looking up.

  At about the same time the article was published, Pleime, a tiny fort sixty miles to the west of us, in la Drang valley, was under a siege that had begun on October 19. Although the attack seemed relatively insignificant at the time, it would be the event that would soon bring the Cav and the North Vietnamese regulars together for the biggest battle yet.

  John Hall spent most of his evenings getting drunk with Jim Storter. But, unlike Jim, John was never found sleeping it off in a wall locker or a cardboard box in the supply tent. They drank for different reasons. Storter took solace in sauce because his wife was
screwing around in the States while the VC were trying to kill him here. John’s problems were all in Vietnam. He believed that the Cav was taking unnecessary chances with his life to prove that air-assault techniques really worked. He had decided after the first few missions that if the VC didn’t kill him, the Cav would.

  “We shouldn’t be landing in hot LZs, Mason.” John sat against the tent pole one night at my end of the tent. “In the Eleventh Air Assault, we were taught to move troops and supplies from one secured LZ to the next. We’re landing in places so hot now that you’d think we were flying armored fortresses or something. Hell, we don’t even have chest protectors.”

  “How do we avoid the hot LZs?” I asked.

  “By landing the troops near the fight, not in the middle of it. It’s no better for them to land in the thick of it than it is for us.”

  “They already seem to know where we will land,” I said. “Did you see the size of those stakes in the last LZ?” We had landed in an LZ that had hundreds of ten-foot stakes in it. The same clearing had been empty the day before. “How can we be sure they don’t pick up on our decision to land farther away?”

  John took a slug of Scotch from his canteen and offered me some. I declined. “The way I see it, the VC are at spot X. Now, while they’re there, they know the Americans can land all around them at any minute. So the VC commander, while at spot X, has some of his men stand guard at all the nearby clearings where he thinks we can land. He can even start a fight to draw us into a trap. It’s a good strategy. If we attack him, he gets a chance to ambush us when we’re the most vulnerable, in the helicopter.”

  “Okay,” I said. “But, like I said before, if he knows where we’ll be landing, as they obviously did yesterday, we’ll always be landing in hot LZs unless we find the source of their information.”