“No. And I ain’t a grunt. I was a grunt; now I’m a gunner.”
“What’s the difference?”
“The difference is that a grunt would go get the fuel for you and I won’t.”
“Good point.” I glanced up and saw a tin-can stove burning on the dike next to the Huey beside us.
“Hey, you guys,” I yelled. “Give us some coffee, huh?”
“Get bent,” yelled Nate, grinning.
“Hey, have a heart. I’m nothing without my morning coffee.”
“You’re nothing anyway, Mason.”
“Shit, I can’t take this whining. I’ll go get some fucking fuel.” Rubenski jumped out and sank to his knees in the leech-infested bog.
“Now, that’s what I like to see—the true determination of an American grunt,” I yelled.
“Gunner!” Rubenski yelled back as he slogged heavily toward Nate’s ship.
When he was just about there, we heard “Crank ‘em!” from up front.
“Goddamnit!” Rubenski turned and slogged back through the morass. “Fuck!”
We cranked and checked in on the radios. The grunts were coming across the paddy, laboring at each step. They were tired and torn, unshaven and grim. Ammo cases clunked wearily on the deck. So did rifles and canteens and helmets. With eight of them in the back, the surface of the deck disappeared under mud and pieces of rice plants.
The flight leader gave us the word to go. One by one the ships wriggled loose from the slime. I rocked the ship back and forth and from side to side as I pulled the pitch. It was especially sticky stuff.
The ship in front of us, an attached ship from the Snakes, had a new pilot, or an old pilot in a hurry. He jerked up through the mud and promptly flipped over. The rotors hit the paddy, exploding into pieces. The mast came off. Parts flew everywhere. When the Huey stopped kicking, men started climbing out the cargo door, now the top of the bent and muddy fuselage. The command ship overhead told us to leave. He would get the men. While we circled back toward the valley ridge, I saw the command ship and a light gunship land and evacuate the men. I grinned while I imagined what the pilot who had crashed was thinking.
We chased Charlie around his valley for more than two weeks, flying too many hours every day. Observed or reported movements of the enemy were immediately countered with air assaults to the spot. The Cav’s Third Brigade fought tirelessly and well in this hectic hopscotch war and was chalking up an impressive kill score. The marines were being misused on the beaches northeast of the war. So far they had not made contact, but a marine had hurt his foot on a beach assault. Things were getting better for pilots because we were shot at less and less in the secured areas. The big question was whether they stopped shooting because they had been defeated or because they just stopped shooting and became civilians.
Colonel Lester, of the Third Brigade, probably wondered about this, too. He decided to find out by putting the VC in a position where they would have no choice but to fight, because there would be no escape. The VC always knew our exact positions by watching the Hueys.
The first stage of his plan was to airlift nearly three battalions of infantry to a crow‘s-foot of seven intersecting valleys, twelve miles south of Bong Son. Nothing unusual about that, except that once the troops were dropped off, we would not return to support them. Instead, they carried several days’ rations themselves and operated independently. For three days they deployed themselves throughout the crow’s-foot silently and without any helicopters flying near them, placing themselves in ambush position for the VC who would be coming their way.
Part two called for convincing Charlie that we were landing huge forces on top of the ridges along the long valley that led to the crow‘s-foot. We did this by flying empty ships for two days to normally prepared LZs along the ridge tops. We went in with all the hoopla of a standard air assault on every one of the fake LZs. On short final, the door gunners blasted the bushes. We landed and stayed on the ground for thirty seconds or so and then left. Later we’d fly out to “resupply” these units at regular intervals. We were in on the plan. And the fact that there was a plan was a novelty. So, for two days, the VC watched the buildup and decided that things were getting too hot in the valley and began to drift south toward the trap.
After the imaginary forces were placed on the ridges, real troops were landed on the valley floor to act as beaters. The beaters ran into occasional Charlie delay teams that sacrificed their lives so that their comrades could make it to safety. During the next few days we supported these beater troops with hot food and new clothes and the phantoms with counterfeit visits.
Life for the grunts in the valley was grim. In a few days they were reduced to sodden, weary, leech-encrusted men. One company took a break at a particularly scenic spot on the river. A hundred and fifty men stripped themselves of their rotten clothes to bathe in the sandy shoals of the river, leaving a handful of men as security. Charlie was well ahead of them. No one felt the slightest threat of ambush at this delicate moment.
Without warning, Charlie opened up. Naked men scattered in all directions as the bullets churned the water. The sentries couldn’t see where the shots were coming from. For long minutes the men were completely exposed. They got to their weapons. The tide of the battle changed abruptly and Charlie was driven off.
I landed next to the riverbank soon after the firefight, and the naked men were still laughing about it. Nobody had been seriously hurt. That was unbelievable, and therefore funny.
We dropped off food and sat on the ground for a while, waiting for the men to eat. I’d spent the night with these guys several times. As usual, several grunts gathered around the machine. Some guys asked all sorts of technical questions. How fast can it fly? How long can you stay up on one fueling? Why don’t you make all your takeoffs vertically? Do you get scared? Others would stand back and grin knowingly, as people do around race-car drivers.
Around us, the men were breaking open the boxes of clothes we’d brought. Their old sets, two days old, were literally rotting off their backs.
One man pointed at a bullet hole in my door. “Where’d that round go?” I slid the side armor forward and showed him the crater where the bullet had hit. “Damned if that wasn’t lucky.”
“Yeah, I’d probably be dead if it hadn’t been there,” I said.
Somebody poked his head inside and exclaimed, “Do you really use all those dials and switches and stuff?”
“Yeah, but not all at once. We check each one in a pattern.”
“What’s that one do?”
“That’s the artificial horizon, which shows you where the horizon is when you can’t see it, like in bad weather.”
The soldier nodded and said, “I’d sure like to fly one of these.”
“What? You crazy, Daniels?” his friend responded. “You want to be a fucking target?”
“It’s better than being a grunt, asshole. You stay clean.”
“Man, what does that have to do with anything? We get dirty, but we can at least hit the dirt when we’re shot at. I mean, haven’t you been on enough lifts to get the piss scared out of you yet? Coming into the LZs is the worst part of this fucking war, because you got no cover. If it weren’t for the shit, I’d kiss the ground every time I got off one of these birds.”
“Yeah, but I bet when you guys get back to base those nurses really go nuts for you, don’t they?” said Daniels.
“Our base?” I started to tell them that our base was just a pile of sand at Phu Cat and that I hadn’t seen one Caucasian female since I’d been here. “Yeah, it is good back at base. I mean, we’re just regular guys like you. But, it’s true, the nurses do get out of control.”