At 1000 feet or so I lit a cigarette and contemplated the new holes. Bad place for ‘em. It’ll leak if it rains.
We didn’t make it back to Lima. We were pulled out with the other three ships in the Red flight for a couple of emergency extractions. Gary and I followed Farris and Kaiser in Red Three to get some wounded out of a hot LZ. The other two ships went somewhere else.
Farris orbited a couple of times to make sure there was no firing going on. We were supposed to wait until the grunts secured the LZ.
“All clear, Red Three.” I heard gunshots in the background as the trooper talked on the radio to Farris. Farris did, too.
“You’re sure?”
“Affirmative, Red Three. You’re clear to land.” Of course, he was lying. I would’ve lied, too, in the same position.
As we made our approach, Farris took the spot I was headed for, so I had to fly a hundred feet past him. I landed in a grassy spot in front of a hedgerow. I saw troopers low-crawling all over the place.
“Secure, my ass,” said Gary.
Two bent-over men ran toward us carrying a stretcher. Sand sprayed out of the grass near them, and they went down. The body in the litter shifted like a doll.
“Fire from the front,” I radioed to Farris.
The stretcher bearers got back up and made it to the side door, where the crew chief quickly jumped out and grabbed one end of the litter and shoved it across the deck. Another few rounds hit the dirt in front of us. I looked at the radio antenna of the grunt leader swinging around behind the hedgerow. “Fucking liar.”
Another litter had been hauled to our other door, and the gunner was out helping. We were locked to the ground. Farris called that he was leaving. “Come on! Come on!” I yelled back between the seats. Two walking wounded rolled on board. The grunt leader stood up for a second and then hit the dirt. All I heard was the whine of our turbine. No shots. Just little puffs of sand in the short grass. At the hedgerow, a man held a thumbs-up. He pointed to a man at his knees and shook his head. For the first time, I noticed the body. Of course it was a body. Strands of intestines had followed the bullets out of his guts and were lying across his abdomen. He could wait a little longer.
I was up. Pedal-turn. Nose down. Tick. Go. Tick. Climb.
The four wounded lived.
We spent a rainy night back at good old Lima. The new bullet holes leaked.
There was a Christmas truce, but we flew anyway, taking patrols out to check on reported VC violations in our territory. I couldn’t get over how bizarre it was. We could decide to stop killing each other for a few days and then start again. I was still young then.
Actually, the reason I was out on Christmas was that I had fucked up a few days before on a flight with Captain Gillette, our supply officer. He and I were the lead ship in a gaggle of forty-plus ships operating in the hills. On the flight back, I became very aware that there were all these helicopters following me. I had never led a big gaggle before.
All I had to do was bring the gaggle back to the refueling area where the Vietnamese worker had died of snakebite. The lead ship had to fly smoothly—no quick turns, gradual descents. But as I started to slow down for the approach, I was too careful. I kept thinking that they would all ram me. I slowed too late, with the result that I overflew the approach. I missed the whole fucking field! Gillette turned to me in awe. There were rumors around that I was a pretty good pilot, and look—Mason missed the entire field, in a helicopter! I had visions of the whole gaggle laughing behind me as I flew past and set up to return. But it was worse. When I made the turn, I saw that all the others had gone ahead and landed while their leader flew off to La-La Land. I flew back to the field flushed with embarrassment. How would I ever live this down?
So on Christmas Day I found myself flying with Farris. He didn’t say as much, but he was checking me out to see why I had fucked up. I was the lead-ship pilot again, but I had spent so much time worrying and thinking about my mistake that I made perfect approaches. I picked the right spots. I allowed enough room for the gaggle to land. My landings, takeoffs, everything, went just fine.
“Gillette said you were having a little trouble with your approaches,” Farris said tactfully.
“That one time, I did.”
“I can see that. You did just fine today.”
“Thanks.”
“Merry Christmas.”
That evening, after we delivered Christmas dinners to all the patrols, we had our own turkey meal. Later we sang a couple of carols, ate some of the goodies sent by the wives and families, and I, for one, shed a few tears when I went to bed.
“I don’t believe it,” Gary Resler said, crouching by his bunk. Heavy gunfire sounded outside our GP. “Why?”
I shook my head in the darkness. “Madness.” A machine gun blasted just outside the tent. I forced my ass farther under the cot, up against the cross braces. I closed my eyes, trying to make the chaos outside a dream. The blast of the machine gun lost itself in the roll of hundreds of other exploding weapons. I was hiding from the madness.
A shadow ran down the aisle, thumping a loose board under my head. Pistol shots rang out inside the tent; then the shadow was gone.
The firing continued. Riker was inside with Gary and me. The others were outside in the trench—safer, maybe. The cot wasn’t going to stop bullets, but I felt safer lying on the floor in the darkness.
“Maybe we should go outside,” Gary called from the corner of his area.
“We tried that, remember?” A staccato blast sounded from just beyond the canvas wall. “They won’t stop!” I shouted. The madness roared like a storm. I guess I won’t forget New Year’s Eve, 1965, I thought.
In a lull, Gary said, “I think it’s dying down. I’m going outside.”
“You’ll be back.” He didn’t hear me. I felt the boards creak as he got up and left. He was back in five minutes.
I felt someone thudding along our aisle again. “Mason, Resler. You guys here?” It was Captain Farris.
“Yeah,” I said from down on the floor.
“Well, get out there and stop them. Stop them.”
“We tried.”
“Well, try again. Let’s go.” He ducked out through the flap.
“I don’t believe this shit,” I heard myself say.
“C‘mon, let’s go,” said Gary.
Under the tracer-streaked sky a spec-five held an M-60 machine gun at his hip, blasting away. The light was dim, but that demonic face was clear.
“Stop that!” I shouted. “Put that gun away!”
The spec-five shook his head and smiled ominously. He watched his tracers stream into the sky toward Hong Kong Hill. God, I thought, there are people on top of that hill, lots of them.
It had started with people shooting into the sky for New Year’s Eve. Now it was totally out of control, and bullets were going toward the radio-relay team on top of the hill. Suddenly tracers came back from the top. The relay team was firing back down into the division.
The Colonel was a spider scurrying and dodging from sandbag pile to ditch to tent, encountering his men gone mad. Fifty feet away from us, he stopped and screamed at a man firing a machine gun. “Stop! I order you to stop!” The man paused, with an irritated look on his face. His battalion commander was becoming a nuisance. He smiled menacingly and swung the hip-held M-60 toward the Colonel, aiming it carefully at his chest. The Colonel shrank back. He turned momentarily to look at Gary and me.