“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.