Chickenhawk Page 7

  The line moved past the front of the mess tent. Into the two halves of my mess kit the servers poured, placed and plopped a variety of foods: “Gainesburgers,” instant potatoes, boiled cabbage, stewed corn, and circles of sliced canned bread. I walked back to the bunker to join my comrades as they ate sitting on a pile of sandbags.

  “Is there going to be beer tonight?” Connors asked.

  “Tomorrow. I’m going to Qui Nhon to pick up a ship-load,” said Nate.

  “How come you get the fun details?” Connors complained.

  “Luck, skill, experience, ass-kissing. You know,” quipped Nate. He had finished eating and was now beginning the ritual of the pipe.

  “Think that bunker will take a direct hit?” Resler asked me.

  “I don’t think so. But I guess that depends on how thick we made the roof.”

  “How thick are we gonna make it, Captain Farris?” Resler turned to our squad leader.

  “I think Captain Shaker wants us to make the roof two bags thick,” Farris answered as he balanced the two halves of his mess kit on his knees.

  “Will that take a direct hit?”

  “Naw,” said Farris.

  Before noon the next day we had laid sheets of perforated steel planking (PSP), normally used for roads and run-ways, across the tree rafters, and laid a roof two bags thick across them. It sagged a little in the middle, but you could walk around inside it if you bent your head down. From outside it looked massive and sturdy indeed, a pattern for the other three.

  After lunch we worked for three hours filling more sandbags when PFC Berne, a runner from operations, ran up to us. He looked concerned.

  “Mr. Connors, you and Banjo are supposed to get in the air right away!”

  “What’s up?” Connors threw his shovel down.

  “Nate got shot down on the beer run.”

  “C‘mon, Banjo.” Connors ran toward the operations tent. Resler and Riker and Leese and I watched them go.

  In the midst of the digging and building, I had forgotten that there were people outside who did not want us here.

  In the pale moonlight that night, we celebrated the beer run. Four pilots, each holding an unopened can of beer, marched around the bunker. With flourishes and chants of “Oh noble leader,” they approached Fields, who sat laughing in a lawn chair. They put the beer on the bunker and backed away, having delivered the fruits of the mission. Those four lonely cans were all that survived of the 100 cases that Nate and Kaiser had picked up in Qui Nhon.

  The Snakes loaned us enough beer for the party. We sat on and around the bunker while Nate and Connors told the story.

  “I was flying at two thousand feet with Kaiser when they got us,” said Nate. “I didn’t see where it came from, but we heard them hit. Two rounds severed the fuel line near the engine, and a few seconds later it got real quiet.”

  “Quiet’s not the word for it,” Kaiser interrupted. “I could hear my heart beating.”

  “This was my first real autorotation. I bottomed the pitch and looked for a place to land. The ton of beer in the back made the trip down real fast, but I made it okay.”

  “Yeah,” said Kaiser, “he landed okay. He put the skids two feet into the fucking ground. Landed okay, my ass.”

  “So, I hit a little hard. I didn’t bend anything,” said Nate.

  “I don’t care if you bent anything; I’m glad you’re all still alive,” said Fields, smiling. “What happened then?”

  “Well, we’re on the ground in grass up to our ass looking at the tree lines. Kaiser called for help on the emergency channel when we were hit. The crew chief and gunner stayed at their guns and covered us.” Nate held his lighted pipe in one hand while his other hand held his elbow. His back arched as he talked, and he periodically used the pipe as a pointer to emphasize a fact. “We musta landed beyond the VC, because there was no more shooting. About two minutes after we landed, a slick from the Snakes came over, checked us on the radio to make sure it was clear, and came in to get us. We stripped the radios and brought them and the machine gun with us. Kaiser wanted to bring some beer out, but the Snake ship wouldn’t wait. As soon as our asses touched the deck, they were gone.” Nate’s pipe pointed up. “So while we were being picked up by the Snakes, Major Fields and Connors and Banjo came out to join us along with a gunship. We met them on the way in and circled back out. From the time we left our ship to the time we got back it was about a half hour.” Nate gestured toward Connors.

  “My turn?” Conors grinned. “Well, when we got to the scene, the gooks had been busy. I could see them scrambling off into the woods as we came up. The gunship dove down after them, but it was too late. When the gunship said it was clear, we came in.” Connors stopped to laugh with Nate over a private joke. “Look, I want you to realize that the grass in that clearing was real deep.” Connors took a drink of beer. “Like I said, the gooks had been busy. They had tried to sabotage the ship, I guess, because they had spent the time slashing the seats to ribbons, smearing shit on the instruments, piling dirt into the cockpit, and cramming sticks down the hell hole. Bright guys, these Vietnamese. They did get one thing right, though. They had taken every single one of those cases of beer off with them. Now, that’s terrorism.”

  “But—” Nate added, with raised eyebrows.

  “But they missed one case. One case had dropped into the grass, and nobody knew where it was until I landed that six-thousand-pound machine right on top of it.” Fields was practically crying, he was laughing so hard. “But,” Connors continued, “I did manage to spare some of those cans.” Connors pointed to the four Budweisers on the bunker. We cheered. Connors raised one of the cans up high and proclaimed, “To the Preachers. May we have more beer and less action.”

  The party broke up early when the sky darkened and the first drops of rain fell. As the storm clouds erased the moon, I remembered that I had yet to improve the drainage trench around my tent.

  “Man, if a snake got in here with me tonight, I don’t know whether I would just lie here and let him bite me or jump out into this fucking rain.” Resler’s voice was muffled through his tent and mine.

  “Snake?” I heard Leese call out. He was on the other side of Resler. The rain pounded so hard it sounded like tearing fabric. My flaps were tightly closed, and I watched the rivulets of water run along the bottom edge of the canvas at the back of the tent. Where the water dripped onto my dirt floor, I scraped a trench with my pocket knife to let it drain out.

  I wrote my nightly letter to Patience. I told her about my tent, not flying, the constant racket from the perimeter, and a sergeant who had been bitten by a snake. He had not checked his bedroll before he got in. Luckily we had antivenom, which was rumored to be as painful as the bite.

  Above the roar of the rain I could hear the whump of mortars and artillery from nearby positions. Small-arms fire crackled from all directions. I could imagine what it would be like to be on perimeter guard duty on a night like this.

  Something moved under the covers. I froze. I felt something cold squirm against my calf. Snake? What should I do? If I yelled or moved, he would bite. While the rain pounded the canvas, I sweated in the stifling air. When it crawled onto my knee, I realized what it was. I pulled the covers back, and a giant brown insect flew into the side of the tent.

  “Snake! Snake!” Connors’s voice was muffled but loud in the storm. I pushed my head outside and pointed my flashlight toward his tent. It was gone. He and his tent spent the rest of the night in the GP.

  I sat with my ass inside the tent to put my boots on. The storm had stopped during the night. The morning was bright, even pretty. Morris and Decker were shaving behind the GP, using their steel helmets as basins. I laced my pant legs into my boots and got up shirtless to walk to the piss tube. The rain had even washed some of the ammonia smell away from the area around the empty rocket case stuck into the ground. These piss tubes were strategically located around the company area. They worked pretty well until they filled up
. The soil would absorb only so much. When they were full, the bad smell helped us find them at night without a flashlight.

  I was thinking about going back to my tent to shave before breakfast when I noticed the crowd around the bunker.

  “I cannot fucking believe it.” Shaker walked back and forth in the middle of the crowd. “I asked you to build a goddamn bunker. A bunker. Look at what I get. I get a fucking burlap-covered mud pile. That’s what I get!”

  The bunker had collapsed. Trees and PSP lay at odd angles, with sodden sandbags drooping among them. Nothing rose more than two feet high in the jumbled wreckage.

  “Goddamn it.” Shaker stalked away.

  “Maybe we should’ve made the walls thicker,” Resler said.

  ———

  Almost everyone in the company sweated in heavy physical labor every day. New tents were set up. Their guy wires blocked our makeshift trails. The company road was finished. We were trenching around tents and hacking and digging the stumps on the Golf Course. The company’s bunker project had been abandoned. I still lived in the pup tent, but I had reduced the chance of snakes crawling into my bed roll by squeezing a cot into the tent and sleeping at the peak. It worked. Police call continued every morning, even though there was nothing to pick up except twigs. Fresh gray dirt was scattered everywhere as evidence of our work.

  A select few of our company flew administration flights to neighboring units in Pleiku, 50 miles west; Qui Nhon; and even Saigon, 260 miles south. Our commanders and their friends got a chance to secure important information about building bunkers and such, to do a little scouting, to go on beer runs, and to get laid.

  When the rest of us finished working at the end of the day, we sponged ourselves clean with water from the water trailer, using our combat helmets as washbasins. The administrators took showers at the Special Forces camps they visited.

  Feeling that I had been sold into slavery, I was honored when Shaker told me to come with him on an admin flight to Pleiku. I packed a clean set of clothes and my dop kit. The Special Forces adviser compound in Pleiku had showers. I would also get a chance to fly for the first time in almost two weeks.

  Being alone with Shaker was more like being alone. During the entire flight over and back, he said not a word to me. I guessed that he was checking me out, but if so, he was doing it in silence.

  The adviser compound was great. I walked on side-walks, took a shower, put some change through a slot machine, and bought some junk, including a small camera, at the PX.

  “You should’ve waited and bought yourself a good camera,” Wendall examined my 16mm Minolta back at our company area. “A good camera, like a Nikon F.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” I said, feeling bad that I had bought the thing. “I’ll just keep it around for quick shots. I’m going to get a good camera as soon as we get some at the PX—when we get a PX.”

  “Let me go with you when you do,” said Wendall. “I know everything about every camera ever made.”

  The day after the flight to Pleiku, I got my first chance to meet some Vietnamese. Hundreds of them.

  “We’re clearing a field here”—Shaker pointed to a spot outside the northern perimeter on the map in the operations tent—“for a refueling depot. Vietnamese labor. They started a couple of days ago, and it’s our turn to supply a overseer. That’s you, Mason.”

  “What am I supposed to do?”

  “Just watch ‘em. They’ve got a Vietnamese boss who knows the details. You’re there to make sure they’re working and to watch for tricks.”

  “Tricks?”

  “Yeah. They’ve been finding trimmed poles pointing right at our mortar and machine-gun positions. Obviously some of the people in the work crew are VC.”

  Truckloads of Vietnamese had already arrived at the clearing when I got there. I rode in a Jeep driven by Sergeant Meyers. Four large deuce-and-a-half trucks were crammed with 150 men, women, and children—refugees, I was told, who were glad to have the opportunity to earn money. The men were paid a hundred piasters a day and the women and children seventy-five. (A piaster was worth roughly a penny.) When Meyers and I pulled up, the truck drivers allowed the workers to get out.

  I had no idea what to do next, but their boss did. Black pajamas and conical hats piled out of the trucks and hurried purposefully off in all directions while the boss yelled orders. A group of adolescents lingered near one truck, and the boss ran over and kicked one of them in the ass. The boss was of sergeant quality. In less than five minutes I was standing in the center of a circle of Vietnamese peasants armed with slashing machetes and flashing axes, watching the edge of the clearing dissolve as they hacked away like large, maddened termites.

  The boss surveyed his charges, and when they all seemed busy, he walked toward me with a big grin.

  “You like, Da wi?” That was the word for captain. Neither of us knew the word for warrant officer.

  “Yeah. Looks like you’ve got everything under control.”

  “You like?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ah.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Nguyen, Da wi.”

  I saw a group of teenage boys talking in a group, facing camp.

  “What are those guys doing over there?” I pointed.

  Nguyen followed my gesture and immediately rattled off some harsh words that sent the boys back to work. Were they VC? Was Nguyen VC? Was anybody VC? So far, VC were rumors to me, noises on the perimeter at night.

  The chopping continued in the blazing sun. Children dragged the debris back toward the center of the circle and piled it up for burning. Everyone sweated profusely. I sweated just sitting on a felled tree trunk. The air sweated.

  Sergeant Meyers sweated as he came over from the Jeep.

  “What should I be doing, sir?”

  Do? I thought to myself. Do? How the fuck would I know what to do? Do you see a sign on me that says Jungle Clearing Specialist? I’m the pilot, you’re the sergeant. Sergeants are supposed to know what to do with work details. Everyone knows that.

  “Ah,” I finally said, “just wander around the circle of workers, Sergeant, and watch the people. Uh, watch for signs, too.”

  “Signs, sir?”

  “Yeah, these people might put markers on the ground to point out our defense positions.”

  “Oh, I got it.” He turned and walked away. I decided to give him the advice always given to me. “Be careful, Sergeant.” He turned and nodded gravely.

  I had wandered away from the tree I was using for a seat while I talked to Meyers. When I turned to go back, Nguyen was attending to a wounded young girl as she sat on the tree. When I walked up to them, the girl jumped up, but Nguyen barked and she sat back down.

  She had a two-inch cut on her ankle. Nguyen wiped at it with the filthy rag that had been his headband. I called to Meyers—who was leering at one of the women fifty feet away—to get the first-aid kit out of the Jeep. The girl watched me carefully, curious and scared.

  Meyers got back with the kit, and Nguyen stepped aside, visibly miffed at the intrusion. The girl’s dark eyes looked even more frightened in the clutches of an American. Was that what she was thinking? “I’ll do it, sir,” said Meyers. He rolled her black silk pant leg up past her knee and began to clean the wound with cotton swabs and hydrogen peroxide. The wound foamed with pink bubbles and the girl whimpered. I guess she’d never seen hydrogen peroxide work before. I told Nguyen to tell her it was good medicine.

  “Good?” He looked surprised.

  “Yes, good.” I nodded. “Tell her.”

  He did, and the girl smiled.

  As the girl limped off to have lunch with her family, I decided I would have her teach me some Vietnamese. I told Nguyen. After a lunch of C rations for Meyers and me and rice and unidentifiables for the Vietnamese, the girl sat on the tree trunk with me.

  She told me her real name but insisted that I call her by an American name. This beautiful and innocent girl on the other side of th
e world insisted that I call her Sally. It was depressing.

  I learned words by pointing at objects and writing what she said in my notebook—phonetically, of course. Before the day ended, I had recorded many words: among others, clock (damn ho), knife (kai zowa), tooth (zing). We spent an absorbing hour making up sentences that worked with the words I was learning. In the process of teaching me, she became more relaxed, and smiled.

  I heard Nguyen yelling, and looked up. He was scolding a group of people at the south side of the clearing. I noticed that Meyers was sleeping in the Jeep with his hat on his face. I stood up and looked around the circle. At the north side I saw a man sitting in the field, in the midst of busy machetes. I was wondering why he would sit down there when Sally tapped my shoulder.

  As she taught me the Vietnamese word for a thing, she would ask me the English word. She tapped my shoulder because I was looking around now instead of teaching her more English. “Tree,” I said as she patted our bench. That was not what she meant. I got up and walked toward the Jeep. On the way, I looked back at the man who had been sitting. He was now lying down. That was enough. Give ‘em an inch and they take a mile. I called Nguyen over. “Go tell that guy to get to work.” I pointed to the malingerer, about a hundred yards away. Nguyen ran off.

  “Get up, Sergeant,” I said as I got to the Jeep. Meyers lurched forward, dropping his hat. “Sorry, sir. I was on guard duty all night.” That was possible. “Okay, but try to stay awake for the hour or so we have left.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  As Meyers walked off, I looked to see how Nguyen was doing. He was on his way back. Behind him, the man still slept.

  “What’s going on, Nguyen?”

  “He not work more, Da wi. He dead.”

  “Dead?” I blinked. “Did you say dead?”

  “Yes, Da wi,” Nguyen nodded matter-of-factly.

  There must be some mistake. This dumb gook doesn’t know what I’m saying. The guy’s asleep, and Nguyen is trying to protect him. If the guy was dead or dying, all those people around him would have said something. Was it a trick? Nguyen’s a VC and he wants me to go over there and be hacked to pieces? Certainly Meyers would never notice.