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  Closeness was measured in rotor diameters. The range for the old salts was from one to three rotor diameters. In actual practice they flew at one or less. When I first experienced this, visions of commingling, counterrotating, and splintering rotor blades danced in my head. There was also talk that these daredevils flew with their rotor blades overlapped by several feet, just for fun.

  I saw these techniques—the low-level, the close formations—performed much more often than I did them. We had very little time. The new pilots would be getting their Huey experience and air-assault training on the job in Vietnam.

  ———

  When they announced that we must turn in all our underwear to have it dyed olive green, and that we were to paint our flight helmets the same color, we knew the time was near. On July 28 I heard President Johnson announce on television, “We will stand in Vietnam,” and “I have today ordered to Vietnam the Air Mobile Division.” A tingle of fear mixed with excitement came over me. The games were over. Life was getting very serious for helicopter pilots.

  The next day, in a moment of grim rationality, I bought a double-barrel derringer as a secret, last-ditch weapon.

  My sister, Susan, was up from Florida to pick up Patience and Jack. I was feeling very cheated. I hadn’t got a chance to live even one month as a normal human with my wife and son. Now I was going away for a year, or maybe forever. Patience and Jack had lived five months in a sweaty room in Texas, four months in a trailer in Alabama, a month in an empty apartment in Virginia, and now another month in another trailer in Georgia. I felt I had not provided very well for them, and now, to top it off, I was leaving.

  To make it even worse, I wasn’t a believer. Now that I was interested enough to read about it, I thought the Vietnamese ought to be able to decide what kind of government they wanted, just like we had. If they wanted to be Communists, then they ought to be. They probably wouldn’t like Communism; but, then, everybody has to make his own mistakes. If democratic capitalism was better for them, then they’d fight for it.

  Probably my feeling that the Vietnam war was a crock was spawned by my fear of dying young. It was a revelation, political or not, that came too late. I was going. I owed the army three years of service for teaching me to fly helicopters. And there you had it.

  I held Jack, and together we smiled at the camera. Patience snapped the shutter. We all got in the car and drove to the fort. While soldiers piled duffel bags into buses, I held Patience, and she cried. I watched, numb, as my sister, my wife, and my son got into the car and drove away. In the parking lot, surrounded by hundreds of green-clothed men milling around Greyhound buses, I felt very lonely.

  We drove from Columbus to Mobile to board the USNS Croatan. It took four aircraft carriers, six troop carriers, and seven cargo ships to move the entire division to the other side of the world. An advance party of a thousand men was being flown over to meet us at our highlands campsite near the village of An Khe.

  We boarded. I wrestled my enormous flight bag through the turns of the dark passageways. The heavy bag tore the button off. the front of my uniform as I stepped through the hatchways. The air was still and musty; the steel walls were scaly with rust. I came out onto a deck that was under the overhanging flight deck. I pulled the bag over to the hatchway, trying to figure how to get it down without breaking anything.

  “Throw it down, Chief,” the warrant at the bottom of the ladder yelled. He was standing on the deck where we would be quartered.

  “This bag?” I said.

  “Yeah, sure, throw it down to me. You can’t carry it down.”

  “This bag weighs as much as I do.”

  “Look, Chief, you want to cause a traffic jam? Throw it down to me.”

  As I tossed the bag down the ladder well, the warrant stepped back. The bag crashed on the steel deck.

  “I thought you were going to catch it.”

  “Did I say that?” grinned the warrant. “That’s your bunk over there. Have a nice trip.”

  2. An August Cruise

  We do not want an expanding struggle with consequences that no one can foresee, nor will we bluster or bully or flaunt our power. But we will not surrender and we will not retreat.

  —Lyndon Johnson, July 28, 1965

  August 1965

  On the crowded ship I finally met all the members of my company. During the month of hectic packing and training at Fort Benning, I barely knew who they were.

  I was in Company B, 229th Assault Helicopter Battalion, one of two such battalions in the 1st Cav. Our company commander was Maj. John Fields, who would be replaced a couple of months after we got to Vietnam. Fields was well liked, but I would never know him well. My platoon leader was Capt. Robert Shaker, a black man, tall and skinny and very professional, which is to say a hardass. My squad leader and the man I would deal with the most was Capt. Dan Farris, a squarish, sturdy man with a built-in smile. He was military, but maintained his sanity nevertheless.

  ———

  “Goddamn it, Connors, you just hit my eye with your elbow,” growled Len Riker, a tall, skinny CW-2.

  “Sorry, Len. This fucking Mae West almost had me then.”

  While we waited for Ensign Wall and Colonel Dogwell to inspect the lifeboat drill, Connors would wrestle endlessly with his preserver. If the wait lasted a half hour, that’s how long he took to put it on. Besides being the company’s IP, Pat Connors was our resident clown.

  “There.” He slipped his shoulder under the strap and straightened suddenly, only to fall against his friend Banjo Bates. “Oops. Sorry, miss.”

  “Watch it, Connors. I’m in no mood for your horsing around.” Banjo folded his arms across the front of his Mae West, scowling, not looking at Connors. Bates almost always looked pissed off, except when Connors got to him, like he was doing now. Connors kept grinning at Banjo, not put off by stern looks.

  “This is fucking crazy,” Banjo said angrily. “Not only do I have to go through this stupid boat drill every other day to prove I can wear a life preserver; I have to put up with a genuine asshole like you, Connors.” He turned and had to smile at Connors’s grinning face.

  “At ease,” said Shaker. Farris and the other squad leader called at ease. “Okay, roll call.” Shaker read the names.

  I still didn’t know most of the men in my platoon by name. In the other platoon I knew Wendall, the camera nut, and his friend Barber, along with the model-maker, Captain Morris, and his buddy, CW-2 Decker.

  “Daisy.”

  “Here.” Capt. Don Daisy loved political arguments and played a lot of chess.

  “Farris.” Capt. Dan Farris. I liked him from the beginning.

  “Gotler.” CW-2 Frank Gotler, a soft-spoken man with a slight German accent who claimed to have flown for a short time in the Luftwaffe.

  “Kaiser.” CW-2 Bill Kaiser. He was short, with quick, darting eyes, and very aggressive. He took no shit from anybody, gambled constantly, and won most of the time. Had he been assigned to fly gunships instead of slicks I think he would have been a real killer.

  “Leese.” CW-3 Ron Leese. He was the highest-ranking warrant in our platoon, the rough equivalent of a captain. Leese was frail-looking, almost elfin, and very experienced in combat flying, having flown gliders in the Pacific and fighters in Korea. He often talked quietly with Gotler. He was new to the Cav. He had taken a leave of absence from his white-collar job to fly in Vietnam. Next to Connors, he was the best pilot in our company, certainly the most experienced in combat.

  “Mason.” WO-1 Bob Mason. Me. Brand new to the unit, just out of flight school, with 250 hours of flying time. I was five ten, 140 pounds, and wore my brown hair daringly longer than the others. I had high cheekbones and squinty eyes. I was attempting to cope.

  “Nate.” Another CW-2. He smoked a pipe constantly and had a voice much deeper than his light build would lead you to expect.

  “Resler.” WO-1 Gary Resler. Another guy new to the Cav and to army aviation.

  “Riker.
”

  “Here.” After getting his eye poked by Connors’s elbow, Riker’s normally ruddy complexion had flushed to lobster. He was a serious man, almost humorless.

  “Okay.” Captain Shaker folded the roster sheet and put it under his arm and awaited inspection. Unlike the rest of us, he was not wearing a rumpled flight suit. He preferred to dress out in fatigues after the morning exercises, with shined boots. Being the platoon leader, he was serious about being a soldier first, a pilot second.

  Ensign Wall of the navy and Col. Roger Dogwell of the army strolled around the corner from the other side of the ship as Shaker finished. Wall always seemed ready to burst into giggles. He was the only navy man on board and therefore in charge of the ship and equal in position to Dogwell. Dogwell was big and looked as if he would have liked to tie the ensign into some kind of handy knot. Shaker gave a loose salute, and the grinning ensign tapped his forehead with a finger. Dogwell scowled.

  “Everybody here?” asked the ensign.

  “Yes, Mr. Wall, everybody’s here.” Shaker’s tone implied, Where do you think they are, walking in the park?

  “Sir, where’s Banjo?” Connors suddenly asked.

  “I’m right here, you asshole.” Banjo gave Connors a jab with an elbow.

  “Oh, thank God, thank God.”

  “That’s enough.” Shaker turned and glared. Wall grinned. Dogwell looked positively vicious. The colonel said the only word I heard him say on the trip: “Pilots.”

  Leese sat next to me at breakfast.

  “I’ve assigned you to fly a ship off the carrier when we get to Qui Nhon.” He smiled.

  “Really?” I smiled back weakly. I still wasn’t at all confident about flying the Huey.

  “Something wrong?” Leese asked. “You look kind of sick. This chow getting to you?”

  “No, the chow’s okay. I’m not too sure about my ability to fly a Huey off a carrier.”

  “It says here”—he produced a penciled note—“that you’re checked out in Hueys. All four models.” He looked back at me.

  “Well, I have flown them, but it was mostly time under the hood at altitude. I had about ten hours of contact-flying instruction in them.”

  “How long have you been out of flight school?” I noticed smile wrinkles around his eyes as he looked at the front of his paper and then at the back.

  “I graduated in the middle of May.”

  “So you don’t feel too confident flying off the ship?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Okay.” He put his notes on the plastic tablecloth next to his food tray. “I’ve just reassigned you to fly with me.”

  “Thanks. I’d rather not end my tour just getting off the boat.”

  “Oh, I’m sure you wouldn’t have any trouble, but I need a copilot, and from what you say, you need the practice.”

  After breakfast I went back to my bunk to find my checklist. I was rusty on the start-up procedure. I got the checklist from my flight bag and walked back to the hangar deck to find a Huey to practice in.

  The trail from our hatchway back through the interior of the ship to the mess hall was like a jungle path through piles of boxes, bags, coils, barrels, cases, and Hueys. Usually the trail was crowded, but I was alone between feeding shifts. In the middle of the deck I squeezed between two fuselages and pushed toward where a large light bulb glowed into the cockpit of a Huey. This was far enough away from the trail for privacy. I didn’t want the old salts to see me. Those guys could go through the entire start-up procedure about as quickly as-I used my Zippo.

  I opened the left cockpit door. Everything inside looked the same except for the armored pilots’ seats. The armor meant that bullets were expected to be whizzing through the cockpit. Why had I argued so strongly with the elimination board?

  I would be flying one of these into battle, something I had never considered as a kid daydreaming about saving flood victims, rescuing beautiful girls, or floating among the treetops picking apples. Not once in any of my fantasies did I have people shooting at me.

  I sat in the first pilot’s seat—the right seat—and looked around. Because our Hueys had no guns except the machine guns the crew chief and gunner used, they were called slicks. Our job would be to carry troopers into the landing zones. People on the ground would be trying to blast us out of the air. Unlike the gunship pilots, we would not be able to shoot back. I could not imagine how that was going to feel.

  The armor added 350 pounds to the aircraft and displaced two grunts. I knocked it with my knuckles. The ceramic and steel laminations, built up to about half an inch thick, fit around and under the seat, made of aluminum frame with red nylon mesh. A sliding armored panel on the side of the seat next to the door pulled forward, protection for the torso but not for the head. We’d be issued chest armor when we got to Vietnam. It seemed pretty complete. I could not imagine bullets going anywhere but into the armor, because in the hangar deck of the Croatan no one was shooting.

  I put my checklist down on top of one of the radios in the console between the two pilots’ seats and twisted around to look at the cargo deck behind me. It was U-shaped because of the intrusion of the hell-hole cover that enclosed the transmission and hydraulics directly under the mast. Our two door gunners would be stationed on either side of the hell-hole cover—in the pockets—firing M-60 machine guns attached to pylons. During our first two months, though, the machine guns would simply be strung from the top of the open doorways on elastic bungee cords. With the crew chief and gunner in the pockets, there was enough room for eight or ten troopers on the cargo deck.

  I turned around to face front, and relaxed. While the Croatan rolled on the sea, I reviewed the cockpit check, and remembered Patience.

  “Sitting around like this all day makes a feller want to go out and strangle somebody, just for fun,” said Decker. Decker was an Arkansan from the other platoon. A dusty, disheveled guy whose sandy crew cut even looked rumpled, he was always with his close friend and fellow Arkansan Captain Morris. Together they swapped Southern aphorisms like “He was happier than a dead hog in the sunshine.”

  Morris was close to forty, and though he kidded with Decker, he looked worried. His thinning black hair was combed back with Brylcream, and his mouth was set thoughtfully, from years of concentration. He was a model-maker. He had acquired the plans of the Croatan from the boatswain and was spending most of his time building a detailed model of it. He even had the rust in the right places. When I got tired of watching the bow or reading or playing chess, I would often watch Morris at work. It was fascinating. His careful hands and peaceful face told me he liked doing what he was doing. But why the Croatan? Morris explained that the Croatan was the last of its kind. I liked and respected Morris. He seemed to be coping better than I during these endless days.

  If I had a favorite time of day, it was the late afternoon, as the sun was setting. One day, as I stood in the bow watching the sun drop into the sea, I spotted something far ahead on the horizon—something on the ocean besides the Croatan. Contact with aliens. We are not alone.

  A guy came up on the bow and propped his elbows on the steel ledge to brace his large binoculars. The thing out in front of us was dark and twisting, like a sea serpent.

  “Looks like a tree branch,” he said. “Something on it, too. Can’t tell what, though.” We waited. “Those things on it are seagulls,” the guy announced to the growing crowd. “They’re turned away from us. I don’t think they know we’re coming.”

  The Croatan was on a collision course with the twenty-foot branch and its two passengers.

  I turned to look up to the bridge, off to the starboard side of the flight deck. A T-shirted man stood just outside the glass, pointing ahead.

  “These boys aim to run those birds down,” said Decker, who had just arrived. “Anybody’d do that’s just as likely to rape your dog or scatter your garbage.”

  By then fifty men were crammed into the bow. I was at the point. The gulls still roosted, fac
ing away from us. They had found the one place in the middle of the Pacific Ocean where they could stop and rest.

  I leaned way over the edge to watch the collision. A perfect hit. The branch shattered in half, and the gulls crouched to leap, only to be sucked under the bow waves. They disappeared. Moments later, on the starboard side of the ship, about twenty feet behind the bow, first one and then the other bird scrambled out through the foam of the waves, shaking its head as its wings slapped the water.

  Leese and I leaned against the starboard railing as we passed Bataan. Blue-gray mounds rose above the sea on the horizon. It was the only land we saw between California and Vietnam. Leese stared silently at the distant islands. He had landed a glider there.

  “What was it like?” I asked.

  “Real hot.” He turned to me, smiling. “It was the worst feeling I’ve ever had. Those fucking gliders didn’t land; they crashed. I thought that I was in control of those things during training, but when they were loaded up with men, they flew like fucking anvils.” He swore only when he talked about gliders.

  “You crashed?”

  “Well, I walked away from it, so you could call it a landing. Some people got hurt on mine, killed on others. It was a terrible idea, gliders…. These Hueys at least will be able to fly back after we drop off the troops.” to

  “So what did you do after the landing?”

  “You were on your own. That was the job. You made the landing, and then you found your way to friendly lines if you could. Some didn’t.”

  “Damn! So how’d you get into gliders?”

  “My whole flight-school class was suddenly redesig nated as glider-pilot candidates and shipped out. No reason. One day we were flying powered trainers and the next we were on our way to glider school.”