“Hey, Nate, something’s wrong with my eyes. Everything’s getting dim.” I stopped.
“Yeah. Mine, too.” The sky turned a pale orange, yet the sun was still high.
“Man, every time I drink too early in the day, I get fucked up. Not like this, though,” said Nate.
While we blinked at our dimming world, we saw our gaggle approaching Camp Holloway. The sun got brighter.
“Aha!” I exclaimed. “It’s not the booze; that was an eclipse.”
“Hey, yeah.” Nate grinned. We weren’t going to continue to dim out and fade to nothingness after all.
The sun got bright again, and the gaggle thundered and whopped and hissed to a landing. We ran back to Holloway to rejoin our comrades.
The original damage estimate was $10,000, later raised to $100,000. The accident board decided that the cause was extreme, dusty conditions. They had let me off the hook. The usual verdict was pilot error. I mean, if the rotor blades came off in flight, the pilot was posthumously charged with failure to preflight the ship properly. One time, I saw the rotors of a Huey slash through‘the cockpit and decapitate the two pilots while the ship was on the ground. The pilots were guilty of not checking the ship’s log. The ship had been “red, X’d” by the crew chief while he worked on the control rods. Pilot error. If you skewered a Huey on a sharp stump during an assault, it was pilot error. If you tumbled down the side of a mountain while trying to land on a pinnacle under fire, it was pilot error. There was usually no other conclusion. So the board was generous indeed when it decided that the accident was due to extreme, dusty conditions. But guess what I thought… the pilot was in error.
We’d already taken Happy Valley, but we had to go back out to patch up a few holes in the victory. Somebody forgot to tell Charlie he lost, so he was still out there shooting down helicopters, the dumb fuck.
The news about our victory against the North Vietnamese Regulars at Ia Drang had been so well reported that the Cav was taking on some of the mythical qualities usually afforded the marines. We were the pros.
I knew that the press was doing a selling job when we supported a newly arrived unit from Hawaii. When we landed to pick up the men, they rushed us like kids when they saw we were air crews from the famous Cav. We were celebrities, the vanguard of more units like ours that would squeeze the Communists back up north like so much shit.
In two days we flew twelve assaults into the same areas we had taken several times before. To add insult to injury, the VC fought even harder.
One LZ lay near the thin jungle at the base of the hills. I was flying number-three slot on the left side of the formation. Our squad was the second one to go in. Gunships made their chattering runs beside us, and door gunners killed bushes. Smoke from the prep was billowing skyward, and as we got to within five hundred feet of the ground, red tracers were streaking among us. By now I had learned to concentrate on my job and to suppress my fear. I felt almost brave. This was Happy Valley. I’d been here scores of times before, and it was never as bad as Ia Drang. Besides, I was one of the pros.
The return fire from the invisible Charlies was more intense as we got closer. We continued straight in.
Near the bottom of the approach, maybe a hundred feet off the deck, I saw a steady stream of tracers off to my left. Aiming at somebody else? Who’s behind me? Then the stream began to move in toward my ship. He’s singled us out as his target. He’s got us. Goddamnit, he’s got us.
I could not move from my slot, or even dodge around. I was flying tight on number two, and somebody was flying tight on me. Just keep going. I felt Gary get on the controls. The tracers were close, only a second away from raking the cockpit.
I tightened my stomach, like the bullets might bounce off. My arms tightened; my jaw tightened; my hands tightened. The rounds must not go through me. Of all things, my wristwatch stood vividly before me. How could I see my watch? I wasn’t even looking at it. It was a gold, square-faced Hamilton that my grandfather had left me. The second hand had its own dial at the bottom of the face. And the hand was not moving. At that moment, I could have unbuckled, opened the door, walked around outside, had a smoke, and watched the flight frozen in the midst of the assault. I would be able to walk between the tracers and use one to light my cigarette. I saw the flight frozen there in midair. I saw myself braced for the impact of that shredding fire. It was almost funny.
An explosive whoosh beside the cockpit caused the clock to run again. Smoking rockets followed the tracers to their source. They stopped, just like that. A Duke gunship had nailed that fucker with a rocket right down the stream of fire. I was saved.
There was a lot more fire on the ground when we landed, but it was impotent. It didn’t matter: I was saved.
Back at the Golf Course, they told us that our first assault into Bong Son was set for the next morning.
The first assault would be to LZ Dog, to secure a base of operations for the grunts. The navy had blasted Dog, the army had artilleried Dog, the marines were landing on the beach ten miles away, and the Cav was sending a hundred slicks in to take the place.
A flight of a hundred helicopters becomes a train of unconnected parts that bunches up and stretches out like the flow of commuter traffic. One minute you’re trying to close a gap between yourself and the flight ahead, and the next second you’re practically hovering to keep away.
The villages we saw before we got to LZ Dog were islands in the sea of rice paddies. This was one of the most valuable of all Vietnamese valleys because of its bountiful rice crop. The people who lived here were sympathetic to Uncle Ho, as was 80 percent of the rest of Vietnam. The other 20 percent, in the American-controlled cities, was engaged in maintaining the colonialist system installed by the French and now run by the Americans. I knew this because Wendall had told me. He said, “Just read Street WithoutJoy and you’ll see.” But there weren’t any copies of that book around here, and it wouldn’t have made any difference anyway, because I just didn’t believe it. I didn’t believe it, because Kennedy and McNamara and Johnson and all the rest certainly knew about Street Without Joy, and they sent us here anyway. It was obvious to me that Bernard Fall was just another flake, the father of the dreaded Vietniks who were attacking our country like so much cancer. And of course the proof of all this was that Wendall himself was still here doing everything I was doing. And even Wendall wasn’t that dumb.
“Yellow One, you are off course.”
No answer.
“Yellow One, turn left twenty degrees.”
Yellow One, the lead ship of this monstrous gaggle, still didn’t answer. Instead he slowed down even more and turned farther away from our course. Nate and I (Resler was away on R&R) were way back in the flight, the fortieth ship or so. We were showing an airspeed of 20 knots. The whole gaggle was staggering and bunching up over some villages at an altitude of 100 feet.