Chickenhawk Read online

  “No, I’m not trying to kill you.” I had caught up with Shaker on a sidewalk in the adviser compound. “Mason, you’re new to our unit and fresh out of flight school, and I’m responsible for your training. You need all the night flying you can get.”

  “But—”

  “You got some sleep last night, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “So be ready to go at 2000 hours.” He left before I could even get started. I wanted to tell him how miserable I felt, how tired I was. But I got angry instead.

  Fresh out of flight school, my ass! I said to myself as I walked back to the mess tent. Need night time, hey? Want to see if I can hack it? Well, let’s just see if I can hack it! I now had a goal that superseded survival.

  The NVA allowed us to land without opposition. They even waited for the crew chiefs and gunners to get out to load the wounded. When they were sure we were on the ground and busy, they opened up. The thing that saved us was the moonless night. As I sat in the cockpit, I remember not being able to see the two Hueys in front of me at all. All our position lights were off. The only light was the faint-red glow of our own instrument panel-until Charlie started shooting. Bright-red tracers streamed in from the dark tree line at the front. They couldn’t see us, so they sprayed the whole LZ indiscriminately. The grunts scattered and started firing back.

  Shaker yelled, “Yellow flight, take off!” Then he went. He didn’t realize that his crew chief was still outside trying to get to another wounded grunt. Stranded, the crew chief was going to be a grunt for a few hours.

  We had got four on board before Shaker yelled. The two ships behind us were empty.

  We took off single file into the tracers. The NVA were firing at our noise, and they were hitting. From where I sat, it looked pretty bad. I was on the controls and veered quickly left and right as I took off, thinking I could actually dodge the bullets. As I dodged, the world became distant. There was no sound. The burning red globes streamed past me. I banked hard to the left as soon as I saw the dim horizon, and the red death left me and licked up, looking for the others.

  The sound came back and I heard the chatter on the radio. Four of the five ships had been hit. We were the exception. Amazingly, no one had been hurt.

  There were still eight wounded to get out back at the LZ, along with Shaker’s crew chief.

  We flew back to Pleiku and dropped off the wounded. En route, Shaker instructed two ships to join him on the return flight. Riker and I were chosen to try our luck again.

  Back over the LZ an hour later, Shaker was told by the grunts that the LZ was too hot, so he elected to land about two miles away and wait.

  I remember being so keyed up with adrenaline that I wanted to go back in, regardless. I even thought Shaker was chicken.

  We stayed strapped in our seats with the Hueys shut down. The clearing was pitch black. This LZ had been taken earlier in the day and was supposed to be secure, but no one believed it. We stayed put.

  The adrenaline high I had produced during the action was now wearing off. I sat in my seat watching little white spots drift in front of me. I felt drained of my strength. The undefined world of my dark surroundings mingled with my black thoughts. Somehow this has got to stop, I thought. I can’t think straight. If the VC don’t get me I will. What’s Shaker thinking of sitting here in the middle of nowhere? Riker and I did not talk.

  I heard a small observation helicopter (H-13) over the spot where the trapped men waited, a scout from our 1/9 Cav squadron. I imagined the pilot bristling with Western .45s and cowboy boots, having a waxed mustache and a firmly set jaw, glaring down into the darkness, looking for signs of the NVA. Theoretically, he would fly low and slow, so the VC would shoot at him. Then, if he survived, he could locate them for the artillery or gunships. Fourteen of the original twenty pilots of that scout unit would be killed in less than six months.

  He circled, invisibly. There was no reaction from the NVA. He grew tired of this passive search, and either he or his crew chief started shooting down into the jungle with a hand-held machine gun. His tracers formed a red tongue of flame arcing down from nowhere. That worked. After a few of these bursts, the NVA opened up on him. Tracers leapt out of the jungle to a spot where they guessed he might be. When they fired, he stopped. They had just given away their position. Minutes later, mortars whumped in from somewhere near where we sat. They kept it up for almost five minutes. The whirlybird went back to check it out. He fired into the jungle again and flew even lower than last time, but he could not draw fire. Either the machine gun had been wiped out or the enemy had gotten smart. We would have to find out which.

  Shaker sent his gunner back through the blackness along the parked ships to tell us it was going to be one ship at a time: Crank up and wait, and monitor the radios until he got out.

  We waited while both Shaker and the next ship got in and out successfully. We were last.

  The approach was eerie because I did it without lights. The large landing light and even the small position lights would make excellent targets. The machine gun was apparently out of action, but the grunts were now saying there was some sniper fire from the tree line. I was on the controls, and I decided to keep going. I talked on the radio to a grunt who promised to switch on a flashlight when I got closer. I lined up on the general area and made a gentle descent into the darkness. The grunt on the radio talked me down.

  “Okay, now left. You’re doing great. No sweat. Keep it coming like you are. Let down a little. I think you should go more right. Okay, you should see the flashlight. Can you see the light?”

  “Roger.” The dull glow of an army flashlight with a special filter on it popped into existence below me, making the man holding it a target.

  A single point of light in pitch blackness doesn’t tell you much. You could be upside down for all you know. Without other references to compare it with, the light seemed to drift around in the blackness. I kept my eyes moving, not staring at the light. Disorientation was a common occurrence at moments like this. It was never clear to me just how I did manage, but the ship touched down in front of the flashlight; the skids hit the ground gently before I realized that I was that close. Apparently we got no sniper fire on the way in. Of course, I would know about it only if we got hit or if the grunts told us.

  We picked up all the remaining wounded, which amounted to two stretcher cases and one walking. The guy with the flashlight jumped on board, too, just before we took off.

  I was very cautious on takeoff and avoided the old machine-gun position by making a sharp turn as we cleared the trees. The Huey was low on fuel and therefore light. I stayed low for a while to accelerate and then pulled the cyclic back hard to swoop up into the night sky. I switched on our position lights so that any other aircraft could see us, and 3000 feet and thirty seconds later we saw fifty-caliber tracers sailing up, glowing as big as baseballs. I switched off the lights, and when we became invisible again, they stopped firing.

  During the half-hour flight back to Pleiku, the flashlight bearer never stopped talking.

  “Mister Riker,” the gunner said, “that guy that got on board back there is acting crazy. He’s talking fast, but he won’t talk into my mike.”

  Riker was taking his turn, so I looked back to see the kid sitting on the bench next to the rushing wind. He made wide gestures with his arms, which I could see, but it was too dark to make out much else. His shadow arms were orchestrating a private nightmare. Make that three wounded and one loony on board.

  We dropped off the wounded at 4 a.m., but the kid stayed with us. He wasn’t wounded, at least not physically. Riker thought we should take him to our operations tent. While we walked there, the kid just followed, talking gibberish.

  We turned in our flight records and mission report to Sergeant Bailey at the operations tent while the kid stood off to the side, mumbling and looking wildly around at nobody. We didn’t try to stop him. We discovered, through Bailey, that he was not supposed to be with us; he was su
pposed to be out where we got him. Bailey did not call his unit but used the field phone to call the hospital tent as we left. As Riker and I trudged off to find our tents, his voice faded to silence.

  Someone got me up at six and said I had to fly. I remember only that I stumbled into the operations tent and said, “I can’t fly now. I have flown too much.” A simple statement of fact. I turned and stumbled away. I heard a voice say, “He can’t fly. He and Riker just got back two hours ago.”

  There was a moment of pleasure as I slipped back into my blankets. My air mattress was flat, but I didn’t care. I was awake enough to realize that they all had to work, but I was going to sack in.

  I was forced to get up again three hours later. Not by the army. God did it. He wanted me to get up. His method was simplicity itself. Just heat up that miserable tent with the sun and bake me out. I felt myself cooking and rolled off my deflated air mattress and pushed my face into the cool earth. My eyelids were swollen shut, and I was drenched with sweat. The cool-earth remedy wasn’t working. For one thing, it tasted terrible. Enough! I reached over to my flight bag to find something clean to wear. The bag had been sitting in this dank tent for the last three days and smelled like an old laundry hamper. I pulled out a set of clean fatigues that smelled dirty and dressed while lying on my back. Boots. My hands found them next to the canvas wall. I noticed that the tent had been designed to hold moisture inside; my hand got wet looking for the boots. I tried to open my eyes again, but the sun was so bright through the fabric that I couldn’t stand it. With my eyes still shut, I laced the boots automatically, and minutes later I launched myself outside. I staggered around feeling like Frankenstein’s monster. I tripped over the tent rope, and during the resulting fall I was forced to open my eyes.

  The watery view through my swollen eyelids revealed the general layout of the camp well enough for me to know where the latrine would be. I probably could’ve just closed my eyes and sniffed it out, but I didn’t want to fall in.

  The latrines at the Turkey Farm were long frame benches built like ladders with maybe four places to sit placed over a corresponding number of sawed-off oil drums. The neat thing about the Cav’s latrines was that they were not enclosed for privacy. I mean, real men can sit out in the middle of a busy camp and shit. No one will watch when you wipe your ass.

  I got a cup of coffee at the operations tent and stumbled over to a homemade tent the guys had jury-rigged while Riker and I had been away. They called it the Big Top. It was, basically, a giant tarp stretched over two thick twenty-foot poles. Compared to the tent I just got out of, it was cool and breezy inside.

  Recovering from my zombie spell, I recounted the activities of the past few days. Riker and I had flown eleven hours yesterday, ten hours the day before, and twenty hours the day before that! That is a lot of time in a helicopter. No wonder I felt so shitty. A new world’s record. No doubt about it. Probably I will be sent home a hero for that, all right.

  When my mind cleared, I realized that I had the day off and could go into town.

  I went into the operations tent to check out. Neither Captain Owens or Mr. White, the operations officers, was in.

  “Owens and White out flying?” I asked Sergeant Bailey facetiously. He was always there because he did almost all the work.

  “No, sir, they’re in the compound.” Bailey had been a colonel once. When he didn’t make brigadier, he was “rifted” (for “reduction in. force”: the army’s way of controlling its reserve-officer-corps population). He chose to stay in the army as an NCO. He made it a point to call a warrant “sir.”

  “They sleep in the compound?” I asked.

  “Yes, sir. They had a rough night last night. Up till 0400.”

  “I didn’t see them when we got back.”

  “They were on alert in their quarters.” Bailey didn’t believe that any more than I did.

  It was my first wake-up at the Turkey Farm. I had nosed into the doings of the Bobbsey Creeps because they pissed me off. I wanted them to be out flying like the rest of us. My fatigue and this added irritant started to push me into a depression.

  Riker, clever about sleeping late, had got up before dawn and transferred himself to a cot in the compound vacated by one of our higher-ranking officers who was out on the morning mission. I bumped into him by accident at the compound mess hall. Over another cup of coffee we made plans to go to town.

  We got a ride on a truck that bounced along the dusty road to the village.

  On the outskirts of Pleiku, the beer-can-metal walls of the huts recently built by refugees lined both sides of the road, just like An Khe. As my tour progressed, I would see these instant slums spring up outside every town and village I passed.

  We jumped out of the truck near the center of town, and Len and I could see that we were the only Americans around. We were out of phase with the usual nighttime crowd.

  On the unpaved strip of red dirt between the main street and the sidewalk, men made shoes from discarded tires and women sold produce. Montagnard women squatted patiently among their baskets, waiting for their men to finish shopping.

  Riker and I walked along the narrow sidewalk, gawking at the strangeness of it all. We smiled at everyone, and they smiled back. Even with their smiles, the people looked afraid. I imagined that our French and Japanese and God knows what other predecessors found Pleiku to be very much the same as we did. So the smiles were probably those of self-defense. I think ours were, too. There was no detectable difference between the people who milled around us now and the ones who tried to kill us every day. It wasn’t paranoid to believe that they were one and the same.

  The fearful smiles of the street drove us inside to the more professionally confident smiles of the restaurant owners, shopkeepers, and bar girls. The more convincing their smiles and back-patting, the bigger their bankroll became.

  We walked inside to the darkness and coolness of a bar-restaurant and ordered a beer and a steak each. I always asked for a New York strip; it made the water buffalo taste better. We had two thin strips of very well done buffalo, french-fried potatoes, and crisp-crusted bread served with canned butter from Australia. It was a meal fit for a king, or even for two helicopter pilots fresh from three days of nonstop flying. We were the only people eating. Other than the three or four ARVNs who drank at the bar, we were the only men there.

  There were, however, several women. We found ourselves surrounded at the table. Ah, to be the center of so much feminine attention again.

  They were not the desperately bold women of An Khe. No one grabbed my crotch. They were, as I remember, beautiful. Riker’s normally red face got redder when one girl insisted on waiting on him hand and foot. She poured his beer, got him more bread and butter, and other little things. She had, as they say, zeroed in on Riker.

  We were talking about the war and the company’s shitty camp and flying and the food, but the conversation was getting difficult. Riker’s haunting angel kept drifting in and out of his attention. In a matter of minutes I found myself being ignored.

  I, of course, had no choice but to strike up a conversation with the girl who sat next to me. Riker and his new friend soon left for the stairs at the back of the bar.

  I forgot all about the war and my promises as the dark-eyed lady smiled and talked in a magic way. The magic was that she spoke almost no English, but I understood her anyway. That she truly loved me was not to be doubted. That her pleasure was my pleasure was obvious. That we should walk down those stairs was inevitable. My promises to Patience when I left home, and to God in the back of the Huey, were forgotten.

  Riker and I had nothing but good things to say about this bar. It became very popular with the men of our company. Later my buddy Resler would become so en amored of one of the delightful ladies that he stayed past curfew, too late to return. He had to spend the night inside the place, trapped, as it were, downstairs with his true love and twenty other girls. His stories about that night became legend.

  The ne
xt day was business as usual. I was scheduled to fly with Leese. He was going to teach me one of his valuable lessons.

  We had been assigned to fly a single-ship mission to haul a load of high-explosive rockets from Pleiku to a Special Forces camp about thirty miles south. The rockets, 2500 pounds of them, were the type used on our helicopter gunships. We often placed caches of them near the action to cut the wasted time of return flights.

  They loaded Reacher’s ship while it was shut down. We were parked on the apron next to the PSP runway and across from the latrine at the Turkey Farm. The rockets were packed so tightly that Reacher and the gunner were pushed out of the pockets and barely had room to sit. I doubted that the load could be lifted, but Leese said it would be a cinch.

  Leese, as was his practice, let me do all the flying. I liked that.

  “Let’s go,” he ordered.

  The starter motor screamed. The turbine whined familiarly and the rotors blurred above the cabin.

  When all gauges showed green, I slowly raised the collective to pull the Huey into a hover. No go. I pulled in full power, but the Huey just sat there shuddering. We stirred up a lot of wind, but we didn’t get one inch off the ground.

  “You’ll have to make a running takeoff,” Leese said.

  If a helicopter can’t hover because of an overloaded condition like this, it can be made light on the skids with the collective and then urged forward with the cyclic so that it slides across the ground on its skids. If it can slide along the ground long enough, it will take off like an airplane, even though it can’t hover.

  It is not graceful. I skidded and scraped along the runway to the takeoff position at the field. The noise of the skid plates scraping against the steel runway chattered and growled through the ship.

  I radioed for clearance and ground slowly down the runway. The tugging of the skids against the corrugations of the runway made the ship rock back and forth. We moved about a hundred feet at a slow walk.