A strange quietness happened in my head. The scene around me seemed far away. With the noise of the guns, the cries of the gunners about everybody being dead, and Farris calling for Yellow One to go, I thought about bullets coming through the Plexiglas, through my bones and guts and through the ship and never stopping. A voice echoed in the silence. It was Farris yelling “Go! Go! Go!”
I reacted so fast that our Huey snapped off the ground. My adrenaline seemed to power the ship as I nosed over hard to get moving fast. I veered to the right of the deadly quiet lead ship, still sitting there. The door gunners fired continuously out both sides. The tracers coming at me now seemed as thick as raindrops. How could they miss? As a boy I made a game of dodging raindrops in the summer showers. I always got hit eventually. But not this time. I slipped over the treetops and stayed low for cover, accelerating. I veered left and right fast, dodging, confounding, like Leese had taught me, and when I was far enough away, I swooped up and away from the nightmare. My mind came back, and so did the sound.
“What happened to Yellow Three?” a voice said. It was still on the ground.
The radios had gone wild. I finally noticed Farris’s voice saying, “Negative, White One. Veer left. Circle back.” Farris had White One lead the rest of the company into an orbit a couple of miles away. Yellow One and Yellow Three were still in the LZ.
I looked down at the two ships sitting quietly on the ground. Their rotors were turning lazily as their turbines idled. The machines didn’t care, only the delicate protoplasm inside them cared. Bodies littered the clearing, but some of the thirty grunts we had brought in were still alive. They had made it to cover at the edge of the clearing.
Farris had his hands full. He had twelve more ships to get in and unloaded. Then the pilot of Yellow Three called. He was still alive, but he thought his partner was dead. His crew chief and gunner looked dead, too. He could still fly.
Two gunships immediately dove down to escort him out, machine guns blazing. It was a wonderful sight to see from a distance.
Only Yellow One remained on the ground. She sat, radios quiet, still running. There was room behind her to bring in the rest of the assault.
A grunt who found himself still alive got to a radio. He said that he and a few others could keep some cover fire going for the second wave.
Minutes later, the second group of three ships was on its way in, and Farris told me to return to the staging area. I flew back a couple of miles to a big field, where I landed and picked up another load of wild-eyed boys.
They also growled and yelled. This was more than just the result of training. They were motivated. We all thought that this was the big push that might end it all. By the time I made a second landing to the LZ, the enemy machine guns were silent. This load would at least live past the landing.
Somebody finally shut down Yellow One’s turbine when we left. Nobody in the crew could. They were all patiently waiting to be put into body bags for the trip home.
Why I didn’t get hit I’ll never know. I must have read the signs right. Right? They started calling me “Lucky” after that mission.
That afternoon, while the sunset glowed orange behind Pleiku in the distance, Leese and I and some others walked over to the hospital tent.
We came to see the bodies. A small crowd of living stood watching the growing crowd of dead. Organization prevailed. Bodies on this pile. Loose parts here. Presumably the spare arms and legs and heads would be reunited with their owners when they were pushed into the bags. But graves registration had run out of body bags, and the corpses were stacked without them.
New arrivals, wounded as well as dead, were brought over from the helicopters. A medic stood in the doorway of the operating tent diverting some of the stretchers away. Some cases were too far gone. Bellies blown open. Medics injected morphine into them. But morphine couldn’t change the facts. I stared at one of the doomed men, fifty feet away. He saw me, and I knew that he knew. His frightened eyes widened, straining to live. He died. After a few minutes somebody came by and closed his eyes.
A new gunner, a black kid who had until recently been a grunt, had come over with me and Leese. We stayed back, but he had gone closer to the pile of bodies just to look. He started wailing and crying and pulling at the corpses and had to be dragged away. He had seen his brother at the bottom of the heap.
Two days later there was a lull in the fighting, at least as far as our company was concerned. We were given the day off. You could hear a collective sigh of relief. Compared to Happy Valley, this was action, and living through a year of it seemed unlikely.
What do you do on your first day off after weeks of action when you’re feeling tired, depressed, and doomed on a hot, wet day at Camp Holloway, Vietnam? You get in a deuce-and-a-half and go into Pleiku and drink your brains out. That’s what you do.
I rode in with Leese and Riker, Kaiser and Nate, Connors and Banjo, and Resler. I remember drinking beer all afternoon—effective because I usually didn’t drink—first at one bar and then another. They all blended into one. Though I had started with Resler as my companion, I somehow found myself with Kaiser at a table in the Vietnamese officers’ club that night.
“We see Americans as being apelike, big and clumsy with hairy arms,” a Vietnamese lieutenant was saying to Kaiser. “Also, you all smell bad, like greasy meat.”
Kaiser had got into a conversation with a racist of the opposite race. I watched the two men hate each other while I drank the genuine American bourbon that the Vietnamese lieutenant had so kindly bought us.
“Of course, you won’t be offended if I continue?” asked the lieutenant.
“Naw,” said Kaiser, squinting. “It’s okay. I don’t give a fuck what a slope thinks anyway.” He belted down another shot.
The two men continued to trade heartfelt insults, the gist of which revealed normally submersed beliefs. Kaiser disclosed the widespread resentment among the Americans that the ARVN units apparently would not or could not fight their own battles. The lieutenant demonstrated that the ARVN resented being rescued by such oafish, unjustifiably wealthy gorillas who were taking over everything in their country, including their women.
After an hour of drinking and insults, Kaiser ended our stay by telling the old “pull the plug” joke to the lieutenant. That was the cynical solution to differentiating between friend and foe in Vietnam and ending the war. The joke had us putting all the “friendlies” on boats in the ocean where they would wait while the remaining people, the enemy, were killed. Then, as the punch line went, we would pull the plug, sink the ships.
Kaiser seemed almost surprised that the lieutenant didn’t laugh. Instead the insulted man got up and left. Soon, looks from the other Vietnamese officers told us we weren’t welcome. We left to continue our party an another bar.
Somehow we missed the truck back to camp. We went back to the officers’ club and borrowed one of their Jeeps. We didn’t tell them we were borrowing it; it was made in America, after all. When the Jeep was found the next day, parked in the Camp Holloway motor pool, it caused a stink. No one knew who it was who took it, but Farris looked awfully suspicious when it was reported at the morning briefing. He had noticed that we had come back by ourselves.
“Pretty slick, guys,” he said after the briefing.