Chickenhawk Page 16

  “Which one of you is the aircraft commander?” Grunt Six asked gruffly. Light gleamed off the sweat on his neck.

  “I am,” said Riker.

  Grunt Six paused a second to look at Riker’s name tag and his inked-in warrant insignia in the faint light. “Mr. Riker, I have a captain on my staff who’s an aviator.”

  “Yes, sir,” Riker said.

  “I want you to let him sit up front to get a little stick time tonight.”

  “Sir, we have orders not to let anyone outside our company fly our ships.”

  You tell him, Len.

  “Mr. Riker”—Grunt Six grew taller and louder—“you and your helicopter are assigned to me. You are now in my unit, and I want you to change the crew for this flight.” He moved closer to Len as he spoke. His thick, burly body contrasted with Len’s tall lankiness. “I think that Mr.”—he glanced at my name tag quickly—“Mr. Mason should stay here.”

  “I don’t think that’s right, sir,” Riker argued. “Bob was assigned to fly this mission with me.”

  “Okay, no problem,” Grunt Six assented. “Let him sit in the back.”

  Some compromise! Me sit in the back? An infantry commander can’t push us around. Riker will put him straight.

  “Okay,” said Riker unhappily. “He’ll sit in the back with you and your assistants.”

  “I won’t be coming along this time; just my assistant,” said Grunt Six. “He’ll use your radios.”

  What the heck, I thought. It’s only for one flight. It wasn’t until we were already in the air that I realized how bad it really was. I had given my replacement my helmet, and I sat on the bench seat deaf and dumb. Reacher and the gunner sat in the darkness behind me, in the pockets. They had helmets. I’ll make Reacher give me his. No, they have to know when to use the guns. I felt like a fish out of water. I was just a passenger on my own ship and not even able to communicate with anybody on board or on the ground. I burned with embarrassment and anger.

  So I sat in the blackness feeling stupid while Riker flew. In the dim glow of the instrument lights, I could see that the dumb shit sitting in my seat wasn’t flying after all.

  We circled the moonless sky. The ground was the darker half of the universe where the stars didn’t shine. Somewhere below, a patrol leader talked to the captain. The captain would then call Grunt Six and tell him what the patrol leader was up to. And so on. We circled for about an hour. I stared at elusive, dark shapes below and watched for tracers. The constant whine of the turbine and the rush of wind were my only company.

  I felt the ship sink. I looked at the altimeter, but it was too dim to read. Were we going to land? My heart raced. Without the controls at my hands and feet, I felt like a worm on a string.

  We continued to descend; the changing air pressure in my ears and the relaxed whine of the turbine told me that. I could make out the very vague shapes of trees in the starlight. Getting close. To what?

  The tracers rushed silently up and past us like a string of red UFOs in a hurry. Quiet, relentless, pretty. For pilots, the bullets are always silent until they hit. First a short string of them, then a longer burst leapt up from the dark. The ship lurched and we banked steeply away. “What’s going on?” I screamed in the noise of the ship. If anyone had heard me, I wouldn’t have heard his reply.

  I leaned out the door and looked back. The tracers lagged behind. They couldn’t see us, and were aiming at sounds. They stopped. This was too much for me. I had never felt more alone and exposed in my life. I called for reinforcements. That meant I promised God that I would quit smoking and I would never touch a whore, not even get a hand job, and I would even believe in Him if He would only let me live.

  The Huey turned back to where the guns were. “You didn’t believe me!” I yelled. “Please, God, goddamnit, please believe me.” As I groveled in the back, waiting for a sign that He heard, they shot at us again.

  Tracers are bright at night. They glow bigger and look closer than during the day. Just being in the same sky with them made me nervous. I was seeing this stream nearly head on, which meant that it was aimed our way. If you saw the line of tracers from the side, then they were going somewhere else. Riker banked the ship hard, turning away from their path. The glowing stream searched vainly in the darkness behind us and stopped. Riker kept turning and headed back to the Tea Plantation.

  That was it! No more backseat flying for me!

  When we touched down, I bailed out and jerked open the left door where the captain sat. “You’re not flying one more second, Captain!” I yelled, surprising myself. I was not open to argument. We were next to a fuel bladder, and the light of a Jeep shone from behind me. The captain had been scared. He looked at me, handed me my helmet, and said, “Don’t worry. That was enough for me.”

  By the time we had refueled and loaded up Grunt Six’s other assistant with his radios, it was almost three in the morning. This tactical-command-ship bullshit was lasting longer than either Riker or I had expected. It wasn’t over yet. Now they wanted us to fly back to the place where we had been shot at so the captain in the back could direct artillery.

  I flew high while the captain talked to a trapped platoon. During my jittery stint as a backseat pilot, we had flushed out the position of a machine gun that was part of a force of NVA keeping the grunts immobilized. There were several skirmishes in the area, and we spent the next three hours, until dawn, acting as a radio-relay ship for Grunt Six and as forward observers for the artillery. The patrol was not overrun.

  At dawn, God said, “Let there be light and also let Bob and Len go back and have some coffee.” The excitement left with the coming of dawn, and I suddenly felt wrung out. The relentless, insistent sleepiness that comes with that time of day was getting to me. I made a dreamlike approach to the Tea Plantation and bounced it in roughly. Riker giggled like a drunk at my efforts. I started laughing, too. Not funny laughter. It was more like sobbing with a smile. As we sat in the cockpit, the captain hauled his radio over to a Jeep. He turned and signaled a “cutthroat” because I still had the Huey running at operating speed. His gesture struck me as immensely funny, and I keyed in the intercom to say so to Riker, but he beat me to it.

  “See that, Bob. He wants to kill himself!” Oh, that was rich. We laughed hysterically at this for so long it hurt.

  Reacher appeared by Len’s door and shrugged. “What’s wrong?” he said. I wiped the tears away and shut down the Huey.

  Time to find some coffee. Reacher stayed behind to take care of his ship. He had either nerves of steel or brains of custard, because he had fallen asleep during the last flight. Now he was energetically climbing all over his helicopter, inspecting every nut and bolt and fluid level. It inspired me to see him doing that. It was a tedious job at best to keep a Huey running properly, and Reacher did it without complaint.

  “You love that helicopter, don’t you Reacher?” I said.

  “Yes, sir. I also don’t like flying around these fucking jungles in a machine that could quit and fall out of the sky.”

  We sat at a table made of used ammo crates. I was eating some reconstituted scrambled eggs when the captain with wings joined us.

  “You guys must be tired.” He marveled at what must have been a couple of haggard faces. “I tried to get a ship out here to replace you. No dice.” He stopped to light a cigarette. “There’s going to be a bunch of troops lifted down there today.” He pointed to the south. “Looks like we’re stirring up some real trouble. More and more skirmishes. Anyway, your battalion said we were lucky to have you. All the rest of their ships are being used in the lifts.”

  “No problem,” said Riker, rising to the occasion. “After this breakfast and coffee, we’ll be ready to go.” His freckled face brightened with a smile.

  “Good, because we’re going to need you all day.”

  I groaned. I would’ve groaned louder had I known that Resler had been on the ground with the trapped patrol. He was shot down trying to resupply them and spent th
e entire night crewing a machine gun with the grunts. But I wouldn’t find that out until I got back to the Preachers.

  We flew alone in the valley between Pleime and the massif, moving small patrols to new locations. We were so tired that caution, proficiency, and even fear left us while we dropped into virgin LZs without company or cover. I had felt pretty good after breakfast, but by ten o‘clock I was pranging the Huey again. So was Len. “Pranging” was an unofficial term we learned in flight school. It was descriptive of both the sound and the deflection of a helicopter’s skids during a very hard landing—the kind of landing that would get you a pink slip and a dirty look from your instructor.

  I was having lapses in concentration. I would set up an approach to a clearing and then just sit there sort of drooling stupidly until the ground hit the skids. When we hit, it would shake me enough to wake me for a more or less good takeoff. But when the flight lasted more than ten minutes, I would fade. Len and I took half-hour turns. We were both rotten.

  Noon marked twenty-four hours since we had left the Golf Course. It seemed like a month. We had been flying nearly twenty of those twenty-four hours. No wonder we both snickered when we pranged our landings. We were delirious with fatigue.

  We continued to fly all the rest of the day and into the night. I don’t remember refueling. I don’t remember the landings. I don’t remember who I carried or where I took them. I didn’t record the number of sorties or anything else I was supposed to do. We were complimented later about our calmness under fire. I don’t even remember the fire.

  Grunt Six’s man called us and said we could quit. We got back to the Tea Plantation at ten that night.

  I fell asleep on the Dust Off stretcher without conversation.

  At six the next morning, we were back in the air for our zealous commander, whose entire air force consisted of our Huey and us.

  It was a very beautiful morning for flying. I had a canteen cup of coffee with me while Riker took his turn at the controls. The coffee and the cool air cleared my mind. I felt much better after my night on the stretcher.

  The day was bright. Deep-blue skies blazed over the shrub-covered hills and valleys of elephant grass. Below, on the side of one shallow hill, eroded ravines had exposed the red earth in a pattern that resembled a drawing of a tall-peaked hut, an aerial signpost set there to show us the way to the Montagnard village nestled in the jungle just a couple of miles beyond.

  I sipped some coffee as we passed over the village. The familiar ground plan featured one hut in the middle of the village that was at least four times taller than its neighbors. I think this was the chiefs hut. Parallel to this row of huts was another row of small cubical buildings that sat off the ground on four posts. There was one of these directly across from each dwelling. I saw these villages peeking out of the jungles and tangled hillsides all through the highlands. They seemed peacefully removed from the business at hand.

  We landed at the hill and were briefed. Same routine as yesterday. The captain on the hill told us, “You gotta move the guys from this list of coordinates to this list of new coordinates.” He handed me a piece of paper. “Keep your eyes open. The net is beginning to tighten up on those gooks, and they might get fidgety.”

  When he said “gook,” I saw that dumb interpreter smiling broadly. On the way out of the tent I said, “How are you this morning?”

  “Yes.” He nodded.

  Riker and I were pissed off about having to go out there and fly single-ship again. Where’s the rest of our company? Why haven’t we been relieved yet? The little sleep we got last night was not enough. We were both “off,” and we were bouncing the Huey again. We finished moving the squads around by noon and returned to the hilltop for lunch and to pick up our new mission. On approach, I noticed that the kid had given up and moved his tent somewhere else. I shut down and the rotors were still turning when an aide from the tent ran out with a message.

  “You got to get back up. A Jeep was just mined five klicks from here.”

  Reacher, who had just opened the cowling of the turbine to check something, slammed it shut as the four of us jumped back into the Huey while I lighted the fire. A medic jumped in as we got light on the skids.

  The medic briefed us by talking through Reacher’s microphone as we cruised over the trees at 120 knots.

  “The Jeep was carrying six men from the artillery brigade. The two that were in the front seats are alive. The other four are either hurt or dead. They’ve got a prick-ten radio (PRC-10), so they can talk to us.”

  I saw the smoke ahead at the spot that matched the coordinates scribbled in ball-point on the medic’s palm. “There they are,” I said.

  We landed in front of the Jeep, or what was left of it. It was twisted like a child’s discarded toy. The edges of the crumpled and torn metal were smoking. It had been destroyed by a howitzer round buried in the road and triggered remotely. Landing in front of the Jeep was dumb; there could be more mines. It was one of those cases where we trusted the ground guys to pick the spot. A sergeant ran up to my door. He told me through my extended microphone that two of the guys in the back were still alive. “Should we put the dead on board?” His eyes were wide.

  We nodded. They started loading up. The two wounded were unconscious, torn and bloody and gray.

  One of the dead had had his right leg blown off with his pants. I didn’t see the other body yet.

  Some journalistic instinct struck me and I took a couple of quick pictures as the wounded were carried toward us. I got one shot of a grunt carrying a severed foot when I realized what I was doing. I stopped. It seemed like the ultimate violation of privacy. I never took another picture of wounded or dead.

  I was twisted around in my seat, watching them load, directing Reacher through the intercom. The man that had lost his leg had also lost his balls. He lay naked on his back with the ragged stump of his leg pointing out the side door. A clump of dirt had stuck on the end of the splintered bone. My eyes shifted away from his groin, then back. Only the torn skin from his scrotum remained. Riker looked sick. I don’t know what I looked like. I told Reacher to move him back from the door. He could fall out. The scurrying grunts tossed a foot-filled boot onto the cargo deck. Blood seeped through the torn wool sock at the top of the boot. The medic pushed it under the sling seat.

  I turned around and saw a confused-looking private walking through the swirling smoke with the head of someone he knew held by the hair.

  “A head? Do we have to carry a head?” I asked Riker.

  The kid looked at us, and Riker nodded. He tossed it inside with the other parts. The medic looked away as he pushed the bloody head under the seat. His heel kicked the nose.

  “We can’t find his body. I don’t think we should stay to look for it. Is his head enough?” a grunt yelled.

  “Absolutely. Plenty. Let’s go,” Riker answered.

  I flew toward Pleiku as fast as the Huey could go. Reacher called from the pocket that “One-Leg” was sliding toward the edge of the deck. I had him tell the medic, who put his foot on One-Leg’s bloody groin. That kept him from sliding out, but the torn skin of the stump flapped in the wind, spraying blood along the outside of the ship and all over Reacher as he sat behind his machine gun.

  A grunt was crying. One of the wounded, his friend, had just died. The other was just barely alive. I wanted to fly at a thousand miles an hour.

  Riker called ahead so we could land at Camp Holloway without delay. We went by the tower like a flash and landed on the red cross near the newly set-up hospital tent. The stretcher bearers ran out to unload the cargo.

  I could see that they had been busy lately. There was a pile of American bodies outside the hospital tent.

  The other wounded man died.

  We had lost the race.

  The stretcher bearers’ technique was to cross the cadaver’s arms and then, with a twist, flip it off the deck onto the waiting stretcher. I watched as two specialists unloaded One-Leg. They dropped him in a
grotesque heap on the canvas. The sun glinted off a gold band on his left hand. The specialists were laughing. About what, I don’t know. Maybe they were so accustomed to their job that they thought this was hilarious. Maybe it was nervous laughter. Regardless, their nonchalance was too much for me. I jumped out and made them stop before they got to the tent. I braced them on the spot and yelled and yelled and yelled.

  “Okay, a company from the First of the Seventh [1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry, a First Cav unit] is trapped here,” Shaker pointed to a spot between the Ia Drang River and the Chu Pong massif on the big map in our briefing tent. “Charlie has them completely pinned down. The grunts say that Charlie can’t overrun them, but they have some bad wounded to get out.” Shaker paused a moment while he checked his notes. “I’m going to take five ships out tonight. There’s no moon, so the darkness will be our cover.” He stopped to suck on another cigarette. He smoked even more than me. Chain smoking made him look nervous, but I don’t think he was. I think he was so intense because he was the only black platoon leader in our battalion. He took another puff and began reading the names of the crews and their ship numbers. I didn’t listen too carefully because I knew that Riker and I were going to sit this one out tonight and get some rest. Then I heard, “… and Riker and Mason in eight-seven-nine.”

  “What?” Riker exclaimed. Shaker seemed not to notice.

  Shaker looked at his watch. “It’s 1730 now. Eat some chow and be on the flight line ready to crank at 2000 hours.” He turned to leave, but stopped. “Those of you not on the mission tonight will stay in the company area on standby.” As he left, the crowd broke up, and I heard rumblings of disappointment about having to hang around. Apparently there were some good bars in Pleiku.

  Riker looked as unhappy as I felt. It seemed that our earlier debriefing had fallen on deaf ears. We had got back from our marathon mission with Grunt Six just two hours before. Shaker knew we had already put in eight hours of flight time today and twenty hours the day before. What was he trying to do, kill us?