Recovering from my zombie spell, I recounted the activities of the past few days. Riker and I had flown eleven hours yesterday, ten hours the day before, and twenty hours the day before that! That is a lot of time in a helicopter. No wonder I felt so shitty. A new world’s record. No doubt about it. Probably I will be sent home a hero for that, all right.
When my mind cleared, I realized that I had the day off and could go into town.
I went into the operations tent to check out. Neither Captain Owens or Mr. White, the operations officers, was in.
“Owens and White out flying?” I asked Sergeant Bailey facetiously. He was always there because he did almost all the work.
“No, sir, they’re in the compound.” Bailey had been a colonel once. When he didn’t make brigadier, he was “rifted” (for “reduction in. force”: the army’s way of controlling its reserve-officer-corps population). He chose to stay in the army as an NCO. He made it a point to call a warrant “sir.”
“They sleep in the compound?” I asked.
“Yes, sir. They had a rough night last night. Up till 0400.”
“I didn’t see them when we got back.”
“They were on alert in their quarters.” Bailey didn’t believe that any more than I did.
It was my first wake-up at the Turkey Farm. I had nosed into the doings of the Bobbsey Creeps because they pissed me off. I wanted them to be out flying like the rest of us. My fatigue and this added irritant started to push me into a depression.
Riker, clever about sleeping late, had got up before dawn and transferred himself to a cot in the compound vacated by one of our higher-ranking officers who was out on the morning mission. I bumped into him by accident at the compound mess hall. Over another cup of coffee we made plans to go to town.
We got a ride on a truck that bounced along the dusty road to the village.
On the outskirts of Pleiku, the beer-can-metal walls of the huts recently built by refugees lined both sides of the road, just like An Khe. As my tour progressed, I would see these instant slums spring up outside every town and village I passed.
We jumped out of the truck near the center of town, and Len and I could see that we were the only Americans around. We were out of phase with the usual nighttime crowd.
On the unpaved strip of red dirt between the main street and the sidewalk, men made shoes from discarded tires and women sold produce. Montagnard women squatted patiently among their baskets, waiting for their men to finish shopping.
Riker and I walked along the narrow sidewalk, gawking at the strangeness of it all. We smiled at everyone, and they smiled back. Even with their smiles, the people looked afraid. I imagined that our French and Japanese and God knows what other predecessors found Pleiku to be very much the same as we did. So the smiles were probably those of self-defense. I think ours were, too. There was no detectable difference between the people who milled around us now and the ones who tried to kill us every day. It wasn’t paranoid to believe that they were one and the same.
The fearful smiles of the street drove us inside to the more professionally confident smiles of the restaurant owners, shopkeepers, and bar girls. The more convincing their smiles and back-patting, the bigger their bankroll became.
We walked inside to the darkness and coolness of a bar-restaurant and ordered a beer and a steak each. I always asked for a New York strip; it made the water buffalo taste better. We had two thin strips of very well done buffalo, french-fried potatoes, and crisp-crusted bread served with canned butter from Australia. It was a meal fit for a king, or even for two helicopter pilots fresh from three days of nonstop flying. We were the only people eating. Other than the three or four ARVNs who drank at the bar, we were the only men there.
There were, however, several women. We found ourselves surrounded at the table. Ah, to be the center of so much feminine attention again.
They were not the desperately bold women of An Khe. No one grabbed my crotch. They were, as I remember, beautiful. Riker’s normally red face got redder when one girl insisted on waiting on him hand and foot. She poured his beer, got him more bread and butter, and other little things. She had, as they say, zeroed in on Riker.
We were talking about the war and the company’s shitty camp and flying and the food, but the conversation was getting difficult. Riker’s haunting angel kept drifting in and out of his attention. In a matter of minutes I found myself being ignored.
I, of course, had no choice but to strike up a conversation with the girl who sat next to me. Riker and his new friend soon left for the stairs at the back of the bar.
I forgot all about the war and my promises as the dark-eyed lady smiled and talked in a magic way. The magic was that she spoke almost no English, but I understood her anyway. That she truly loved me was not to be doubted. That her pleasure was my pleasure was obvious. That we should walk down those stairs was inevitable. My promises to Patience when I left home, and to God in the back of the Huey, were forgotten.
Riker and I had nothing but good things to say about this bar. It became very popular with the men of our company. Later my buddy Resler would become so en amored of one of the delightful ladies that he stayed past curfew, too late to return. He had to spend the night inside the place, trapped, as it were, downstairs with his true love and twenty other girls. His stories about that night became legend.
The next day was business as usual. I was scheduled to fly with Leese. He was going to teach me one of his valuable lessons.
We had been assigned to fly a single-ship mission to haul a load of high-explosive rockets from Pleiku to a Special Forces camp about thirty miles south. The rockets, 2500 pounds of them, were the type used on our helicopter gunships. We often placed caches of them near the action to cut the wasted time of return flights.
They loaded Reacher’s ship while it was shut down. We were parked on the apron next to the PSP runway and across from the latrine at the Turkey Farm. The rockets were packed so tightly that Reacher and the gunner were pushed out of the pockets and barely had room to sit. I doubted that the load could be lifted, but Leese said it would be a cinch.
Leese, as was his practice, let me do all the flying. I liked that.
“Let’s go,” he ordered.
The starter motor screamed. The turbine whined familiarly and the rotors blurred above the cabin.
When all gauges showed green, I slowly raised the collective to pull the Huey into a hover. No go. I pulled in full power, but the Huey just sat there shuddering. We stirred up a lot of wind, but we didn’t get one inch off the ground.
“You’ll have to make a running takeoff,” Leese said.
If a helicopter can’t hover because of an overloaded condition like this, it can be made light on the skids with the collective and then urged forward with the cyclic so that it slides across the ground on its skids. If it can slide along the ground long enough, it will take off like an airplane, even though it can’t hover.
It is not graceful. I skidded and scraped along the runway to the takeoff position at the field. The noise of the skid plates scraping against the steel runway chattered and growled through the ship.
I radioed for clearance and ground slowly down the runway. The tugging of the skids against the corrugations of the runway made the ship rock back and forth. We moved about a hundred feet at a slow walk.
The idea is to get going fast enough for the rotors to start swinging through undisturbed air rather than in their own turbulent downwash. When the whole rotor system is spinning in clean air, it suddenly lifts very strongly—translational lift.