Chickenhawk Page 6

  “Here, you take it for a while.”

  “I got it.”

  Below us the narrow road twisted upon itself as it began to climb up through the steep foothills. As the ground rose toward us, I could not resist pulling a little pitch. Two hundred feet higher and we flew through occasional wisps of cloud. The world disappeared for a few seconds each time.

  At the top of the pass the ground rose to within 800 feet of us. The empty road ran through thick jungle. A tall hill called Hong Kong Hill, ten miles ahead, marked our camp.

  “A lot of nice places to hide down there,” I said.

  “I’ll say,” Leese said quietly as he watched the ground. From our vantage point Vietnam looked very big and very green with its thick covering of jungle. It looked like a great place to have a guerrilla war, if you were going to be the guerrilla. “I’ll say,” Leese repeated.

  The overcast was breaking up ahead, and the jungle glowed green between dark shadows formed on the ground. Leese reached over to click the radio to our company frequency. I felt the cyclic move slightly as he squeezed the radio trigger. “Preacher base, Preacher eight-seven-niner.” Our ship’s tail number.

  “Roger, Preacher eight-seven-niner. Go ahead.”

  “Preacher eight-seven-niner at the pass. Where do we park?”

  “Preacher eight-seven-niner, call Golf Course control and they’ll clear you to land at our parking area. We’re located at the south end of the field on row three. We’ll send someone to pick you up. You copy?”

  “Roger, Preacher base. Eight-seven-niner out.”

  As the land sank toward An Khe, I reduced the collective and let the ship descend slowly. Dead ahead of us, just north of the road, was Hong Kong Hill, the western border of Camp Radcliff. The Golf Course, the heliport cleared of all its trees, stood out against the green.

  “Golf Course control, Preacher eight-seven-niner, five miles east for landing instructions.”

  “Roger, Preacher eight-seven-niner. You are cleared for a straight-in approach to the south on row three. Follow your ground guides.”

  The skinny Song Ba River ran beside the eastern perimeter of the camp. Two miles to the south it grew to a hundred yards wide near the village of An Khe. Near the river, between the village and the camp, was a small airstrip built by the French. The Cav’s fixed-wing aircraft were using it now.

  Leese rogered the instructions from Golf Course control, and I swung off to the right so I could loop around and come back toward the field on a southerly heading, for a straight-in approach.

  “Keep it high until we get closer,” said Leese

  “Okay.”

  The sun shone brightly as we cruised over the jungle north of camp and turned south to line up on row three. I started my descent about a mile away and a thousand feet high. Our advance party had done a big job. The Golf Course was dotted with thousands of stumps. Around it the trees stood thickly.

  “Preacher eight-seven-niner, short final.”

  “Eight-seven-niner, cleared to land.”

  I reduced the pitch and pulled back on the cyclic to set up my approach flare. The top of Hong Kong Hill rose above the horizon on our right as I descended below it. As we got closer, the Golf Course looked very rough.

  “Man, look at all the stumps,” I said.

  “Incredible.”

  Six straight, parallel rows of helicopters were divided by vehicle tracks that jogged through the mud among ravines and stumps. Olive-drab tents, trucks, water trailers, Jeeps, and people littered the cleared area past the south end of the Golf Course, where we would be living.

  At 500 feet I crossed a swath cut through the trees that formed the northern perimeter of the camp. The edge of the Golf Course was still 500 feet ahead. Among the trees below I saw hundreds of pup tents. Thousands of our troopers were camped along the meandering perimeter, guarding the rest of us.

  I flared steeply at 200 feet to slow the Huey for the landing. Just above the top of my instrument panel, at the south end of the Golf Course, I saw a man waving his arms as he stood on a Jeep.

  “See him?”

  “Got ‘im,” I said.

  I came to a high hover in the center of the rough dirt row. I was nervous about hitting the tail rotor on the rough ground. The man who had waved us in now motioned us over to a parking slot between two other ships. My inexperience was showing. I overcontrolled the sensitive tail-rotor pedals and waggled toward the slot.

  “Takes a while to get used to the tail-rotor control in a Huey,” said Leese.

  Six weeks ago I had had no trouble with the tail-rotor pedals. Now I was handling them like a student.

  “Why am I having trouble now?” I complained.

  “It’s common, Bob. You just need some flying time to get the feel of the ship. There’s no substitute for experience, you know.” Leese used his floor switch to talk to me so he wouldn’t have to touch the cyclic while I hovered.

  I floated over a very large stump and nosed into the slot. A reverse slope rose toward the tail. As I pulled the cyclic back to stop, I could imagine the spinning tail rotor smashing into the dirt. The Huey hovers tail low anyway. I was too cautious. I let the ship down so gently that a gust picked us back up. I overcompensated and we dropped rapidly. I overcompensated for that and we rose abruptly.

  “Relax,” said Leese. “You’re doing fine.”

  That’s what an instructor says to a nervous student. I felt the heat of embarrassment rise in my cheeks.

  First the heel of the left skid touched ground lightly, followed by the heel of the right skid, not lightly, and then the ship plopped forward ungracefully and settled flat on the skids.

  “A little work on your last three feet is all you need,” said Leese. “Your air work and the approach were top notch.”

  The ground guide drew his hand across his throat, signaling me to shut down the ship.

  And so I made my first landing on Vietnamese soil.

  We threw our flight bags in the back of the Jeep. Reacher stayed behind to supervise the unloading of the booty from the Croatan. As Leese and I rode 500 yards along the waffle-tracked ruts to our company’s area, I saw the five sky cranes I had heard so much about. Even by helicopter standards they were ungainly-looking. They were skeleton-framed helicopters designed to lift 20,000 pounds. Removable, pre-loaded, mobile-home-size pods fitted neatly under them, including a completely equipped emergency-surgery room. And they could sling-load big artillery pieces, as well as any aircraft the army owned, including the twin-rotor Chinook, which usually retrieved the downed Hueys.

  “Welcome to Camp Radcliff,” said Captain Owens, the operations officer. He had come out of the operations tent, one of our two general-purpose (GP) tents (these tents measured 20 by 40 feet). He and CW-3 White, the other OPS officer, lived in the back.

  “Where’d they get the name Radcliff?” asked Leese.

  “A major in the advance party who got killed at the Mang Yang pass,” Owens said.

  “Where’s that?” I asked.

  “Up the road about twenty more miles,” said Owens. His olive-drab T-shirt was dark from sweat. “On the way to Pleiku,” he added. He pulled his dark-stained cap off and pulled the bottom of his shirt up to his face. Sweat dripped out of his hair and beaded across his beard stubble. “His ship got shot down from three thousand feet over the pass by a fifty-caliber machine gun. Tracers picked him out and followed him all the way to the ground.”

  “So, how is it around here?” asked Leese, as he struggled with his flight bag, pulling it out of the back of the Jeep. It weighed as much as he did.

  “Very confused.” Owens leaned up against the front fender, hat in hand. “Every night there’s a bunch of firefights on our perimeter. A lot of it’s our own troops shooting at our patrols coming back to the line.” He turned around to face north. “Up there last night”—he pointed—“five guys in a patrol were killed trying to get back in. My advice to you is not to walk around the camp at night. You’re liable to
get blown away by nervous grunts. I don’t blame them, though; some of the action is VC, too. There’s no physical perimeter line around a lot of the camp, so the boundaries aren’t clear to everybody. The guards get confused and shoot at anything that moves or makes a noise.” Owens laughed suddenly as he replaced his cap. “Couple of nights ago, they must’ve put a hundred rounds into a water buffalo.”

  “Where do we sleep?” asked Leese.

  “You have to set up a pup tent for the time being. Our platoon tents aren’t here yet. Probably still on some boat somewhere in a Conex container. The major said to set up on this side of that GP there.” Owens pointed to the other GP tent, a hundred feet past his. “Good luck,” he said.

  That night while rain tapped on my tent I wrote Patience a letter by candlelight. I told her how painful it was to be so far away, how I missed her and Jack, how much I loved her. Small-arms fire popped and crackled in the darkness. I had talked to a guy at Belvoir who had told me how great his Vietnam tour had been. He had a villa overlooking the ocean, willing hooch maids, casinos, and great buys at the PX. He had been stationed with a group of advisers somewhere along the coast, where he flew officials around from one Special Forces camp to another. I thought of him and cursed my luck.

  Everybody was busy working in the company area the next morning. I was leaning against a stack of mattresses that I was about to lay out in the sun when a Jeep bounced out of the slop of the perimeter road. A colonel got out. After a brief word with Major Fields, he turned to us.

  “We have heard reports that some mattresses and other supplies were taken off the Croatan.” He walked closer to me and the mattresses. “Now, I know that no one from the 229th would do this, but you know how the navy is. Complain, complain, complain. So I’ve got to officially ask you men if you have seen any of these missing mattresses and ropes and lumber and stuff from that ship.”

  I pushed myself away from the stack of hot merchandise. He looked at us and smiled warmly. His eyes did not so much as glance at the stack. He pinned his look on Connors.

  “No, sir,” said Connors. “I sure haven’t seen anything like that. I’d sure like to have one of those mattresses, too.”

  “I’m sure you would, son,” said the colonel, nodding kindly. “Anybody else know anything about this missing gear from the Croatan?” the colonel said as he walked toward the GP tent. Nate, standing next to the canvas doorway, said, “No, sir. Haven’t seen anything like you’re talking about around here.” A huge pile of ropes lay nearby.

  “Not a thing, sir,” said Riker, leaning against a stack of lumber.

  “Nothing, sir,” said Kaiser.

  Twenty pairs of eyes sincerely, innocently denied that all this stuff lying in full view existed.

  “Well, thank you, men, for your time and your cooperation.” The colonel smiled and turned to Fields, who walked him back to his Jeep.

  While the sun dried our gear, Fields called us together for a briefing. The map tripod was set up in front of the operations tent. Fields was wearing a set of the new jungle fatigues and boots that the advance party had picked up for him. The rest of us were waiting for them to be issued. Jungle fatigues fitted loosely. The top wasn’t tucked in; it was more like a safari jacket. The boots were canvas-topped and vented to keep your feet dry.

  “Okay, men, now that you are all here, this is what’s happening.” Fields held his folding pointer collapsed in front of him. “All that activity you saw out on the Golf Course yesterday was the 227th”—our sister assault-helicopter battalion—“going out to help the 101st.” He unfolded the pointer and then snapped it shut again. “They got the Airborne out of a bind and lost some ships and people doing it. I don’t have accurate figures yet.” (Four ships shot down, one crew lost, it turned out.) He opened his pointer and turned to the tripod. “The reason for this briefing is to give you the lay of the camp and what we’re going to be doing for the next couple of weeks.” He pointed to a drawing of the camp on the first page of the big pad. “Our four companies are grouped here, below the southeast corner of the Golf Course.” He described the camp layout and then stopped and tore off the page, revealing another drawing. “This is a plan for Bravo Company’s area.” He pointed. “Now, notice that this road here on the map is not on the ground over there.” He pointed toward the medical tent that marked the division between us and Charlie Company, nicknamed the Snakes. “Nor is this ditch, or this bunker, nor any of these tents. Putting these things in place on the ground will be our job. The only flying will be admin flights and courier missions. We must finish setting up camp before we start work. Everyone will work. That means all officers and warrant officers as well as NCOs and enlisted. There will be police call every morning and plenty of work details every day. Furthermore, some of you will have to go out on the Golf Course and chop out the stumps.” Fields paused as some of us turned around to look at the 275-acre heliport and the thousands of stumps.

  “You mean, the engineers aren’t going to push them things out?” said Decker.

  “That’s right.” We turned around as Fields spoke. “The engineers aren’t being used, because we don’t want to expose the dirt. When we get into the dry season, the dust will be fierce around here.” We looked back around to the muddy trails and ravines. It didn’t look as though it could be much worse than it was.

  “What do we do with the stumps after we dig them out?” Decker was very interested in the stump operation.

  “When we get enough of them loose, the plan is to haul them away with the Hueys. That’s down the road. In the meantime, I need a detail to fill sandbags for the bunkers, a detail to cut the road, a detail to dig the ditches, and a detail to put in phone lines.”

  Somehow the glamour of being an army aviator eluded me. I dug ditches along the company road. Resler, Banjo, Connors, Nate, Riker, and Kaiser dug, too.

  We were worrying out a small stump in the middle of the road when a little green snake wriggled out of the roots.

  “Hey! A snake,” yelled Banjo.

  “Hey yeah,” said Connors, “let’s catch it.”

  The snake was trying to get back into the protection of the roots. Armed with a variety of sticks, shovels, axes, and other probing instruments, we rolled the stump away and surrounded the snake.

  “Is it poisonous?” asked Nate.

  “Naw,” said Connors. “It’s a green snake. I’ve seen them a hundred times back home.” Connors jumped abruptly as the snake, which he was trying to pin with his stick, struck fiercely. “Damn. I’ve never seen them do that before.”

  “Shit, Connors. You going to let a green snake scare you?” laughed Banjo. He squatted down with a stick to try his luck.

  Captain Farris came to see what the commotion was all about. “Hey, don’t touch that snake,” he yelled. “That’s a bamboo viper. Deadly poisonous!”

  The circle of snake hunters widened quickly.

  “Poisonous?” Banjo turned and glared at Connors. “Shit, Connors, I was just about to grab that little fucker. Green snake, my ass!”

  “It’s green, ain’t it?” yelled Connors.

  “Yeah,” said Farris. “It’s a green bamboo viper.” Farris took a shovel from Resler and quickly pushed the blade through the snake and firmly into the ground. The two halves twitched and wriggled in the dirt. Its mouth yawned wide in its death throes.

  “Just remember,” said Farris, “of the thirty-three kinds of snakes over here, thirty-one are poisonous.”

  “How do we tell them apart?” asked Resler.

  “I think that with those ratios, you could afford to come to a prejudicial, sweeping generalization—like, kill them all.” Farris turned and left.

  The dirt from the ditches was shoveled into sandbags. Our squad was divided. Five of us filled the bags while the other half carried the sixty-pound sacks a hundred feet to the site of our first bunker.

  We laid a foundation of sandbags measuring fifteen feet square with one opening for the door, deciding after much deba
te that the walls only needed to be one bag thick. Once the foundation was laid, more guys from the platoon joined us to speed up the work. By late afternoon we had the walls six feet high.

  Another work detail had been given the task of getting large trees to serve as the rafters for the roof. These were smoothed and trimmed to size with axes. Just before evening chow, we had them set in place across the top of the sandbags.

  “Look at the shit in this dip water.” Captain Morris, the mess officer, scowled at the garbage can of steaming water. Kerosene immersion heaters were supposed to keep the water boiling to sterilize our mess gear. As the first few men walked past and dipped their gear, the water began to cool and collect a thin film of grease and assorted debris. Morris stomped angrily into the mess tent, presumably to confront the mess sergeant.

  Decker eyed the water disdainfully. “This damn water is rank enough to bury,” he said loudly.

  “Yeah,” said Connors from behind me in the chow line, “they should bury it in the same pit they throw whatever else died in there.” He nodded toward the mess tent.

  “That’s our chow you smell,” said Banjo.

  “I’m gonna puke.” Connors made a face and grabbed his stomach. “What is that shit? Why can’t we eat C rations?”

  “Gainesburgers,” said Banjo. We had named the army’s canned ground-beef patties, served in gravy, after the dog food. The preserving process had converted real meat into an unidentifiable, chewy, dry substance soaked in grease.