“You’re not… sick,” I had said, pointing to her groin, “are you?”
“Me?” Her face showed pain. “Me? Don’t be silly. I no sick.”
“If there’s one thing I can’t do, that’s catch the clap,” I said.
“Well,” she huffed, “I’m almost a virgin.”
Just as I noticed the silence, Resler shoved me. “Bob,” he whispered, “the nurses are here.”
The Colonel had come unannounced, through the club’s back door, escorting his promised nurses. They, I’m sure, did not know that they were the inspiration that had built this club. They did have a look of extreme self-consciousness about them. The entire club stared intently and silently as four elderly, high-ranking females from the medical corps took seats at the Colonel’s table, cause enough for their nervousness.
The music played on. Two very plump lieutenants followed. I kept looking at the door to see the rest. That was it. After a long minute, that was clear to everyone. Talk began again.
“There must be some real nurses in this fucking division,” snarled Connors. Banjo was laughing so hard that he was in tears.
“Those are nurses,” said Resler.
“You know what I mean,” said Connors. “You know, nurses. Like with tits that come up here”—he gestured—“not down here. Shit, my grandmother is more appealing.”
The Colonel kept looking around while his aides talked to the nurses.
“Ladies.” A drunken warrant officer walked over and bowed politely to the nurses. ‘Gen’lmen…“ He nodded to the aides. ”Sir…“ He bowed again.
The Colonel glared at him. The nurses laughed. When he turned to leave, the Colonel relaxed. At a moment when the club was silent, and while every eye was glued to the scene, the drunk released a fart that stopped hearts.
The Colonel, his men, and the nurses flinched at the report. The Colonel grew red in the face and started to get out of his chair, perhaps to kill the drunk. Noise returned abruptly to the club and he hesitated. Everyone was laughing. It was as though everyone had delivered that fart, and the Colonel knew it. He sagged back in his chair helplessly. The nurses explained that they had to get back, right away.
Farris said, “I think you men should stop drinking and go home. We have a big mission tomorrow.”
It wasn’t a very big mission, just lengthy. Since I’d been back from R&R, the daily missions were in the mountains forty and fifty miles north of An Khe. We started each day at 0500, picked up grunts at the Golf Course or the refueling area, flew them out to the mountains, placed them at various LZs, and picked up wounded and dead from the patrols already out there.
This area wasn’t too bad for the pilots. We weren’t getting killed. The grunts, though not beaten, were suffering losses from constant sniper fire and devious booby traps.
After a week of our carrying wounded and dead people, the deck and bulkheads of the cargo area got very rank. Dried blood caked under the seats, and miscellaneous pieces of flesh stuck to the metal. When it became absolutely necessary to wash out the gore and smell, the pilot would make an approach toward the bridge going to An Khe and land in the river.
Washing out the Hueys spawned a new support industry among the Vietnamese around An Khe. As we came across the bridge, boys would scramble toward the shallow area near the sandbars where we usually landed, ready to work.
The only thing we had to worry about was not getting the electronics wet. Everything else, up to deck level, was unaffected by water. I hovered around in the shallows with the skids underwater until I found a spot that was the right depth. It was safe as long as you kept an eye on the tail rotor. As soon as the engine shut down, the boys would grab buckets and brushes and begin scrubbing the ship. The crew chief usually took out the seats for the scrub-down.
I took off my boots and socks, stashed them on top of the console, rolled up my pants, and made it to the shore. While I stood on a sandbar and watched, the crew chief supervised the project and the boys did most of the work. They even climbed up on the roof and poured water down the hell hole, which was industrious of them but completely unnecessary.
Other forms of business prospered on the sandbars. One was the Coca-Cola business. The other was mermaids. The Cola girls had exclusive territories. The girl in the area I usually landed was named Long. Because I flew to the sandbars a lot, she knew me pretty well.
Long was about ten years old, with waist-length black hair. Her eyes were black, and her skin was darker than that of most Vietnamese. She was a gorgeous and radiant little girl.
“Do you have a wife?” she asked when we first met. I said yes.
“Is she tall like you?”
“No, she comes up to my chin.”
“Ah, very tall. Does she have hair on her arms like you?”
“Not like me, like you.” I brushed the peach fuzz on her arm.
“Oh, that is good.” She laughed. She had never seen Caucasian women.
We became friends over a period of months. Long usually sat beside me on the sandbar while the Huey was washed and talked about how nice it would be when the war was over. She believed that it would be over very soon. There was talk of peace overtures going around. She could not imagine how the VC could beat soldiers that marched through the sky.
When a ship was rinsed out, the crew chief would normally want to let it dry a little. Then he would get undressed to go for a “short swim.” The inspiration for this healthy and athletic act came from the older girls, who pretended to be mermaids and beckoned sweetly from downstream islands.
The mermaids showed up at the river the day after the general placed An Khe off limits as a result of the high rate of social disease. For months, while an American-regulated village of ill repute was being constructed just outside town, the mermaid business flourished. I never drifted down the river myself, but from what I could see, it looked very sweet indeed.
Eventually the ship would dry and the crew chief would come back smiling. Long would get up to say good-bye. Standing, she was only a ccuple of inches taller than I was sitting.
“Good-bye, Bob. Be well.” She smiled and wandered off to sell her wares as other Hueys landed among the sandbars.
When I flew a ship to the sandbars, I usually tried to teach the crew chief some basic flying so that he could take the ship in case a pilot got hit, and get it to the ground in one piece. The results of this training were disappointing, because there was never enough time to pursue it. Consequently I never saw a crew chief who was able to fly even a rudimentary approach.
What seemed to me the most basic of human skills—hovering a helicopter—somehow eluded even the most intelligent crew chief. But among the men I tried to train, Reacher was notable. I had flown with him so much that he was almost able to hover, and I believe that in an emergency he might have got a ship down on the ground in one or two pieces.
Rumor was it was getting hot again in the Ia Drang. While the First of the Ninth was over there snooping around, we continued our ass-and-trash missions around the home base. The pilots were tired of this kind of flying, and the ships suffered the mechanical equivalent of lassitude and dishevelment. The flyable rate was less than 50 percent. On the same day that a Chinook was shot down, our company broke four Hueys from just sloppy flying. At the news of the four accidents, the general reaction was “four less Hueys to fly.” Malaise had set in.