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  The sixteen slicks flared in unison with Yellow One and settled into the tall grass. My landing was almost automatic; I just mirrored everything Orange Three did. As the heels of the skids hit the ground, the grunts jumped out and bounded off toward the edge of the clearing, firing as they went. I saw no opposition, no incoming fire to remind me that I had no chest armor. None of us did.

  Yellow Three waited fifteen seconds, then made his takeoff. We all watched for his tail to move and lifted when he did, staying tight so we wouldn’t straggle and delay someone on the ground.

  As we climbed over the forward tree line, I heard more machine-gun fire from our flight. “See anything, Red?” Connors said as I banked hard to the left to keep up with the flight. Out his side window the trees passed directly under us. “No, sir.” The gunners were just having fun.

  “Take a break. I got it.”

  “You got it.”

  “You did real good, Bob. I tell you, if that’s the way the assaults are going to be, we’ll all live through this.”

  “Yeah. I didn’t see any return fire at all,” I nodded. “Now what?”

  “We go back to the pass and wait.”

  “Piece of cake,” said Nate.

  “Nothing to it,” Resler replied.

  “Heard the rumor? The VC are giving up,” said Wendall.

  We gathered around a paddy dike and exchanged greetings and impressions. The slicks were parked at Lima, a laager area we would come to know well in the next few months. It was a giant field of dry rice paddies about two miles east of the An Khe pass and next to Route 19. The gunships were still out supporting the grunts.

  The dry ground ended a hundred feet from where we were parked, and wet rice paddies ran all the way to a distant village in the east. A group of water buffalo approached from the village. Some kids rode on the buffalo as they splashed through the mud of the paddies. At the head of the line was an old man carrying a staff. As they got closer the old man veered toward us while the others continued on.

  “Bon jour,” he said.

  “What’d he say?”

  “He said ‘good day’ in French,” said Nate.

  “You speak French?” asked Connors.

  “RSVP,” said Nate. He turned and talked to the old man.

  The man grinned broadly when he heard Nate. His hands were gnarled, and his legs were covered with sores. He wore a loincloth and a black shirt. He talked excitedly with Nate.

  “What’s he saying?” I asked.

  Nate shook his head and laughed as he turned to us. The old man watched. “He says that he is glad we came back.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Connors.

  “He thinks we’re French,” said Nate.

  “Dumb fuck,” said Connors.

  “Not so dumb,” said Wendall. “The French fought a lot of battles around this road. As a matter of fact, they lost a big one right over there at An Khe pass eleven years ago.” We followed his hand. “And a lot of the locals around here must have been in their units. Maybe this guy was.”

  “How do you know that?” asked Connors.

  “I read.”

  Nate told the man that the French had not come back and that we were Americans. Then he had to tell him what Americans were and that we had come from even farther away than the French to help him fight the Communists from the north.

  “Ho Chi Minh.” The old man grinned broadly.

  “He likes Ho Chi Minh?” Resler was shocked.

  “He says that Ho is a great man and that someday he’ll unite the country.”

  Resler’s eyes narrowed with suspicion. “Doesn’t that make him a VC?”

  “I don’t know,” said Nate. “He seems like a nice guy.”

  We had C rations for lunch, coffee and cigarettes afterwards. We spent the time trying to stay out of the sun. But even in the shade the muggy air let no one escape the heat.

  I talked to Wendall about photography, and about the French. He had read Street Without Joy, by Bernard Fall. His descriptions of how the French were destroyed around here by the same people we were going against got me depressed. The major reason our leaders felt we could win where the French hadn’t was our helicopters. We were the official test, he said.

  Connors kidded Nate about speaking French. “Only pansies speak French, you faggot.”

  Resler lay in the shade beside his Huey with his head propped against the skid so that his chin almost touched his chest. He was reading a paperback. A guy from the other platoon came by to show us a mongoose he’d bought from the kids. It was young and tame, and he named it Mo‘fuck.

  We waited. This was much worse than the assault. Worse than the assault? God, I could see how it was going to be. I would get so bored I would look forward to the battles. Waiting. I remembered a guy saying that if he knew he would be killed during his year here, he hoped it would be immediately so he wouldn’t have to put up with the bullshit and the heat and the waiting. What are they doing?

  I heard someone whistle through two fingers and looked up front toward the flight leader. Someone waved a hand in a circle over his head.

  “Crank up!” I yelled, feeling suddenly refreshed. Orange flight scrambled into their ships and lit the fires. By sundown we had picked up the grunts without incident and had them back at row three. They had spotted nothing on their patrol. Wendall said that the VC wanted to see how we operated before they engaged us.

  Leese found me in the chow line the next morning and told me that he and I and Resler were scheduled to go on a training flight that night. “Resler will sit behind us while you fly for a while, and then the two of you will trade places. The old man wants me to check you two out on night approaches and a short cross-country.”

  So, after a day of shovel work on the Golf Course, the three of us flew night training until midnight. We stayed very high, 5000 feet, but even then we got shot at over Cheo Reo.

  “Fifty calibers,” Leese said calmly as the big red balls drifted up in front of us. “And they’re not even close.” Even so, they were close enough for me.

  The perimeter around our camp was visible from the air, a hundred-yard-wide swath with barbed wire, concertina wire, land mines, and claymores. We had two weak sections, one near Hong Kong Hill and another near the river. Both areas were constantly probed by the VC at night.

  If we were seriously attacked, all the ships would be flown off somewhere. I didn’t know exactly where, because I wasn’t in the evacuation plan. For some stupid reason, a few of us were supposed to stay behind and defend the camp. We could hide in our assholes, as they say. Resler was also part of this team of gung-ho devils.

  “Do you know we have shotguns?” he asked me one day. He was actually surveying our weapons, the ones we would use for this defense.

  “They’re illegal,” I said.

  “I know, but we have about two dozen of them. You and I and the rest of the expendables are supposed to know about them. You know, to use when they’re surging relentlessly over the ditches, screaming ‘Tien-len!’”

  “What’s ‘tien-len’?”

  “Wendall says that’s what they yell as they make their final charge. You know, the human-sea tactics.”

  “Fuck Wendall.”

  So each night was full of expectations as I lay on my cot. Listening.

  At about this time I read the first article about us in a worn copy of a news magazine being passed around. The tone of the article made us seem heroic because it sounded like an old newsreel. We were referred to by a tag we never used, the First Team. Pretty heroic-sounding, not as tough as “Leatherneck,” but better than “Dogface.” Beginning with our secret advance team, we had chopped out our 3000- by 4000-foot heliport near An Khe with machetes to make room for our more than 400 helicopters. It mentioned that our lineage went back through Korea and the Philippines and to General Custer.

  The article went on to describe why we were there. The American garrisons established in the coastal enclaves had been
the first step in helping the South Vietnamese hold on to the territory they already had. The First Team was extending deep into the middle of Viet Cong territory. From there our choppers would allow us to wander freely throughout Vietnam, hunting down the Viet Cong, undaunted by obstacles such as jungles, mountains, and blown-out bridges.

  The piece ended dramatically with the accurate prediction that the First Team was not going to be the last such unit to punch its way into enemy territory. More air mobile units were on the way. Music, helicopters fly into the sunset, fade.

  Connors was so high after one mission that he tried to snag the rotor with the tie-down strap while it was still slowly turning. A truck came down the line picking us up and slogged to a stop in front of his ship. Calls of “Get the lead out, Connors” came from the packed deuce-and-a-half. He was the last stop. As one of the blades swooped by eight feet off the ground, Connors held the chock and tossed the loose ends of the straps over it. They wrapped around the blade, tightened, and snatched Connors completely off the ground.

  “Haw, Connors, you asshole, where’d you learn that trick?” Nate yelled, delighted.

  Connors stood up and tried to dust the mud off the front of his fatigues. He turned to give us a snappy reply, but the whole truckload was laughing so hard that he just looked embarrassed and grinned sheepishly. It was great. Hooray, the company IP makes a mistake. And right in front of all of us, too.

  “I would never do that,” said Resler, sitting next to me at the back edge of the truck. “Would you do that?”

  “Not me,” I said. “Would you do that, Riker?”

  “Not me,” said Riker very loudly. “Only an Instructor Pilot asshole would try to lasso moving rotor blades.”

  Leese sat smiling next to me. He and I had flown the last mission together, my first hot mission. I felt pleasantly tired, calm, and strangely satisfied.

  On our last few missions we had taken patrols out to Happy Valley, dropped them off, and waited at the laager area. On this last one, grunts had made light contact and reported several skirmishes where we had dropped them. We had taken three loads to the LZ; that was three trips in, so we would have to make three trips to get them out.

  As we came in for the second pickup, Leese said that Shaker was making a bad mistake flying the same path over the trees each time.

  “As soon as the VC get the idea that we repeat our flight path, they’ll set up machine guns along it.”

  We were Orange Four. I was on the controls. I was actually having fun because I was getting pretty good at formation flying. Leese’s complaint reminded me that there were people down there who did not give a hoot that I flew formation well. All they wanted was to shoot me down.

  “What should we be doing instead?”

  “Take a different path in every time. Keep ‘em confused.”

  We landed the second time without incident. Half the grunts jumped onto the sixteen ships, leaving the rest to wait for the last flight. After a thirty-second pause to let us load up, Shaker took off over the forward tree line. We followed his path. The ship I was flying seemed much stronger than usual. I stayed with the flight with no trouble at all, not falling back, as some of the dogships did. When everything was working right, it was exhilarating, this air-assault stuff.

  “See, he took off right over the same place he did last time,” Leese said through my earphones. “No good,” he mumbled. I thought Leese was being too cautious. I thought we were doing fine.

  It took thirty minutes to get the grunts back to the Golf Course and return. Shaker led us back to the valley at 1500 feet and 100 knots. About five miles out from the LZ, he dove down to treetop level for the approach. This was the exciting part, the low-level flying. Leese had taken the controls on the way out, and I was getting a great demonstration of low-level flying. He stayed right in the trees while at the same time keeping us close to the number-three ship. Occasionally a treetop would flash between us and them. Leese would let the fuselage pass between two trees, tilting the rotor just in time to pop over the rushing branches. A hundred knots is not all that fast until you’re as close to the ground as we were, where the effect of speed is confusing.

  “Same flight path,” grumbled Leese as the trees streaked by. Shaker was leading us back along the textbook approach, over the lowest obstacles, up a valley of trees toward the LZ—our third trip along the same path.

  “Yellow Two taking hits!” Decker’s voice shot through me.

  “Muzzle blasts from three o‘clock.” A totally useless call. No call sign; therefore, no position.

  As Shaker crossed the forward tree line, he called “Flare” over the radio to warn us to slow for the landing.

  “White Two, receiving fire off our right side!” Connors’s voice sounded above the crackle of his own machine-gun fire.

  We would be at the hot spot any second now. I had already checked the sliding armor panel on the seat. It was all the way forward, but I still felt naked. I was light on the controls, feeling Leese’s quick correction. Why the fuck didn’t we have chest armor?

  As our right door gunner opened up with the machine gun, I tried not to flinch. I watched the passing trees and clearings to see if I could see the enemy. If I could spot. them first, I could direct the gunner. Maybe. I’m gonna transfer to guns the second I get back, I thought. At least they can shoot back.

  Someone ahead had slowed too much on the flare, and we had to slow even more to keep from colliding. I felt like a fly in molasses, with the swatter coming down. A gunship raced by on our right side, smoke pouring back from his flex guns. The grunts in the LZ were yelling on the radio about taking fire. I glanced across at Leese, but I could not see his face. The LZ was just ahead. For some reason Leese was now wagging the tail as we crossed the last hundred yards before the clearing.

  “I saw one!” The door gunner on my side exclaimed. His gun chattered loudly.

  “I got him!” His voice was very shrill. “I got him!”

  “Orange Four, Charlie at three o‘clock,” Leese called out for the benefit of the Red flight behind us.

  “Sir, I got him!”

  “Keep looking,” I yelled. “Keep fucking looking!”

  The slicks squatted into the LZ, and the grunts raced from their cover at the tree line and jumped on board. Red Four, the last ship, called out that all the grunts were on board. Shaker acknowledged by taking off immediately. He turned slightly left, following the same path out as the last two times. Before Leese and I crossed the forward tree line, a ship in Shaker’s flight called that he was taking fire. Leese turned harder left and cut the corner of the turn that Shaker had taken, wagging the tail again. He stayed lower than anybody else, too. In the trees. As each group of four ships passed over the tree line, I heard calls about taking hits or receiving fire. (“Taking hits” meant, obviously, bullets hitting your ship. Visible muzzle blasts, puffs of smoke, or Charlie taking a bead constituted “receiving fire.”)

  We darted low-level among the trees for a mile or so before climbing to a safe altitude. It was quiet now. My shoulders drooped.

  “Anybody hurt?” Shaker called.

  No answer. Our ships had taken only a few minor hits. Decker had one bullet hole through a rotor blade. Nate had one come through his canopy. Another of our pilots, Captain Sherman, had one stopped by his seat armor. It had knocked the breath out of him when it hit. I saw the crater it formed on the bottom of his seat when we got back. That armor really worked. Now, if only we had something in front of us. A bullet-proof helmet would be nice, too.

  “How about a plane ticket back home?” said Resler as we joked in the back of the truck. “That’ll keep the bullets away.”

  Connors crawled into the truck after he tied the rotors down. “Anyone here tells anyone back at the company about my fight with the rotors gets a bad grade on their next check ride.”

  4. Happy Valley

  Americans are big boys. You can talk them into almost anything. All you have to do is sit with th
em for half an hour over a bottle of whiskey and be a nice guy.

  —Nguyen Cao Ky, July 1965

  October 1965

  It had been raining steadily for almost half an hour when Connors decided to take the plunge. I saw his hairy ass bouncing out the back door of the warrants’ tent. He was carrying his combat helmet and a bar of soap.

  “Oh, this is the life!” Connors yelled from outside. “Oh, yes. Clean, clean, clean. I wish some of you smelly bastards would take the goddamn hint!” He broke into unintelligible song.

  Banjo bounded outside, naked.

  “The first of the smelly bastards arrives,” Connors announced. “Welcome, miss. Set your helmet down here.”

  “Oh, thank you,” Banjo said in falsetto.

  Kaiser ran out, then Riker, then Nate and some officers from the next tent. Soon most of the company was outside, showering in the rain.

  Even me. Against my better judgment. Last time we tried this, the rain stopped when I was fully lathered. Several of us had got caught. We had waited around, standing in the mud, soap suds tightening on our skin as it dried, for the rain to start again. It never did.

  Thirty of us played around in the mud near the long washstand we’d made. A bunch of steel helmets stood on the frame as washbasins, collecting water in case the rain did stop.