“We might do that soon,” said Riker. “If we can trap the NVA before they get to Cambodia, we’ll knock the shit out of ‘em.” Riker paused, and our hosts grunted their agreement. “After we knock the shit out of ’em, I think they’ll want to quit fighting and make peace. They’ll want to give up and go home.”
“I’m for that,” I said.
It was eleven-thirty. Everyone was tired, and we decided that we would put off winning the war until tomorrow morning. I switched ends on the stretcher to avoid the stain from the piece of meat.
Lying on my back, I watched the stars again. Stuff watching stars. My thoughts drifted to the other side of the world, where Patience, at this same moment, would be getting Jack to the table for lunch. When I last saw him, he was fourteen months old and just beginning to toddle around without falling down too much. He liked to play a game of not doing what his mother wanted him to do.
“Time to eat, Jack,” she would say. “No.” He would laugh and run to the bedroom. “Jack, come to the table.” Jack giggled in the bedroom, climbing up on our high bed. Patience came to the doorway and looked in, smiling. “Jack, you come eat right now. It’s not time to sleep.”
“No.” He laughed defiantly.
“Yes. Now, get up,” she said firmly.
“Come on, get up.” Riker shook my shoulder.
“What?” I opened my eyes, and the stars were still there. “What time is it?” Maybe if I pointed out what time it was, he would change his mind.
“Twelve. We’ve got to go on another mission, right now.”
“Mission?”
“Yeah. Come on. Grunt Six is going to meet us at the chopper in ten minutes.”
We got to the ship and woke up Reacher and the gunner. Minutes later, I could see the tent shadows cast by Jeep headlights dancing across the side of the Huey. The Jeep stopped fifty feet away. Figures walked from behind the headlights into their bright cones of light. Silhouette tunnels of darkness arrowed out and wavered in front of them.
Grunt Six approached Riker and me with his two captains in tow.
“Which one of you is the aircraft commander?” Grunt Six asked gruffly. Light gleamed off the sweat on his neck.
“I am,” said Riker.
Grunt Six paused a second to look at Riker’s name tag and his inked-in warrant insignia in the faint light. “Mr. Riker, I have a captain on my staff who’s an aviator.”
“Yes, sir,” Riker said.
“I want you to let him sit up front to get a little stick time tonight.”
“Sir, we have orders not to let anyone outside our company fly our ships.”
You tell him, Len.
“Mr. Riker”—Grunt Six grew taller and louder—“you and your helicopter are assigned to me. You are now in my unit, and I want you to change the crew for this flight.” He moved closer to Len as he spoke. His thick, burly body contrasted with Len’s tall lankiness. “I think that Mr.”—he glanced at my name tag quickly—“Mr. Mason should stay here.”
“I don’t think that’s right, sir,” Riker argued. “Bob was assigned to fly this mission with me.”
“Okay, no problem,” Grunt Six assented. “Let him sit in the back.”
Some compromise! Me sit in the back? An infantry commander can’t push us around. Riker will put him straight.
“Okay,” said Riker unhappily. “He’ll sit in the back with you and your assistants.”
“I won’t be coming along this time; just my assistant,” said Grunt Six. “He’ll use your radios.”
What the heck, I thought. It’s only for one flight. It wasn’t until we were already in the air that I realized how bad it really was. I had given my replacement my helmet, and I sat on the bench seat deaf and dumb. Reacher and the gunner sat in the darkness behind me, in the pockets. They had helmets. I’ll make Reacher give me his. No, they have to know when to use the guns. I felt like a fish out of water. I was just a passenger on my own ship and not even able to communicate with anybody on board or on the ground. I burned with embarrassment and anger.
So I sat in the blackness feeling stupid while Riker flew. In the dim glow of the instrument lights, I could see that the dumb shit sitting in my seat wasn’t flying after all.
We circled the moonless sky. The ground was the darker half of the universe where the stars didn’t shine. Somewhere below, a patrol leader talked to the captain. The captain would then call Grunt Six and tell him what the patrol leader was up to. And so on. We circled for about an hour. I stared at elusive, dark shapes below and watched for tracers. The constant whine of the turbine and the rush of wind were my only company.
I felt the ship sink. I looked at the altimeter, but it was too dim to read. Were we going to land? My heart raced. Without the controls at my hands and feet, I felt like a worm on a string.
We continued to descend; the changing air pressure in my ears and the relaxed whine of the turbine told me that. I could make out the very vague shapes of trees in the starlight. Getting close. To what?
The tracers rushed silently up and past us like a string of red UFOs in a hurry. Quiet, relentless, pretty. For pilots, the bullets are always silent until they hit. First a short string of them, then a longer burst leapt up from the dark. The ship lurched and we banked steeply away. “What’s going on?” I screamed in the noise of the ship. If anyone had heard me, I wouldn’t have heard his reply.
I leaned out the door and looked back. The tracers lagged behind. They couldn’t see us, and were aiming at sounds. They stopped. This was too much for me. I had never felt more alone and exposed in my life. I called for reinforcements. That meant I promised God that I would quit smoking and I would never touch a whore, not even get a hand job, and I would even believe in Him if He would only let me live.
The Huey turned back to where the guns were. “You didn’t believe me!” I yelled. “Please, God, goddamnit, please believe me.” As I groveled in the back, waiting for a sign that He heard, they shot at us again.
Tracers are bright at night. They glow bigger and look closer than during the day. Just being in the same sky with them made me nervous. I was seeing this stream nearly head on, which meant that it was aimed our way. If you saw the line of tracers from the side, then they were going somewhere else. Riker banked the ship hard, turning away from their path. The glowing stream searched vainly in the darkness behind us and stopped. Riker kept turning and headed back to the Tea Plantation.
That was it! No more backseat flying for me!
When we touched down, I bailed out and jerked open the left door where the captain sat. “You’re not flying one more second, Captain!” I yelled, surprising myself. I was not open to argument. We were next to a fuel bladder, and the light of a Jeep shone from behind me. The captain had been scared. He looked at me, handed me my helmet, and said, “Don’t worry. That was enough for me.”
By the time we had refueled and loaded up Grunt Six’s other assistant with his radios, it was almost three in the morning. This tactical-command-ship bullshit was lasting longer than either Riker or I had expected. It wasn’t over yet. Now they wanted us to fly back to the place where we had been shot at so the captain in the back could direct artillery.
I flew high while the captain talked to a trapped platoon. During my jittery stint as a backseat pilot, we had flushed out the position of a machine gun that was part of a force of NVA keeping the grunts immobilized. There were several skirmishes in the area, and we spent the next three hours, until dawn, acting as a radio-relay ship for Grunt Six and as forward observers for the artillery. The patrol was not overrun.