“See you.” I watched him walk away.
I decided to watch him take off, so I sat on some sandbags in front of the operations tent.
“Where they sending you, Mason?” Captain Owens came out and pushed his cap back.
“A place called Phan Rang, Forty-ninth Aviation Company.”
Owens nodded. “Never heard of ‘em.”
“Neither have I, but they’re not the Cav.” Gary and Swain climbed into their ship, 881, the oldest Huey in the company.
“Ha. ‘Not the Cav’ is right.” Owens grinned. “Nobody’s the Cav.”
Gary’s ship was running now, so I got up to leave.
“Well, good luck in your new company,” said Owens.
“Thanks.”
They were in a hover, backing out of the slot, when everything came unglued. The ship vaulted backward over its own tail. The rotors hit the ground, and the transmission and drive shaft came off. The fuselage slammed into the ground. Pieces flew everywhere.
“Jesus!” I yelled and ran down the path. The fuselage was crumpled, lying on its back. I saw the crew chief scrambling out of the wreckage, pale and wide-eyed. I humped to get there, visualizing Resler as crumpled as his ship. Then I saw him squirming out through some twisted metal. He was scared but smiling.
“You all right?” I yelled.
Gary brushed himself off and began laughing. Swain was out walking around in circles. The crew chief was on his knees, trying to pull the gunner out of the pocket. Jet fuel dripped in puddles near him. “Come on!” the crew chief yelled, pulling.
Freed, the gunner, was bleeding from a gash on his temple. Gary was wandering dumbly toward the operations tent. Then he stopped and came back to the wreckage.
“You okay?” I ran over to him.
“Sure.” He laughed. “Sure, I’m okay. Why’d you ask?”
“Why’d I ask? Look at the ship!”
He laughed again, a giggle from a pale and confused face. “Bad landing!”
Some people walked the gunner up to the med tent. He was the only injury. I relaxed. “It’s only a bad landing if you don’t walk away from it.”
“What happened?” Gary’s question was broken by spasms of laughter.
“You don’t know?”
“Shit, the last thing I knew I was locking my belts, then wham!”
“Swain was flying?”
“Yeah. I didn’t think he could fuck it up getting out of the slot, you know.”
“Hey, Mason, the Jeep’s waiting to take us to the airfield,” Riker yelled from the tent.
“Shit. Hey, I gotta go. Again. You’re okay?”
“Sure. Why’d you ask?”
Riker dug around in his bag looking for something. The vibrations from the cargo ship were putting my ass to sleep.
“You know, Riker, every time I go to Saigon, you’re with me.”
“That’s right, you lucky fuck. I’ve got to get a room tonight ‘cause my R&R plane’s not leaving until tomorrow. Want to share a room?”
“Why not? I’ve got two days to get to my new assignment,” I said. Riker nodded in the loud droning. I looked across the deck, through a window, and saw the plane was banking. Probably getting close. Then we hit some bumpy air. It reminded me of the fly-by for the general.
We had practiced for two days, and the weather couldn’t have been smoother. A line of Hueys, Chinooks, Caribous, and Mohawks, even some little H-13s stretched for two miles, looped to the An Khe pass and back toward the Golf Course. “Keep ‘em tight,” said the Colonel. We did. Resler sat copilot and I flew because our position put my side closest to the ship we were flying on.
“You don’t have to go that close, you know,” Resler said.
“These guys know what they’re doing,” I said, referring to Connors and Banjo in the ship we followed. “I’d feel okay overlapping blades with them.”
“Fucking daredevil.”
I grinned, liking the label, and moved closer. “I knew I should’ve kept my mouth shut,” said Gary.
I moved the rotor tips so that there was no more than three feet between us and the other ship. I held a vertical clearance of three feet to allow for any rough air and the surges it would cause.
“Ever overlapped blades before?”
“Never. Never will, either.”
I kept the three-foot vertical space and moved gently in. My left hand on the collective jerked up and down, keeping our blades above Connors and Banjo’s. Banjo was watching. He grinned from only a few feet away and raised his fist, thumbs up. Then he waved me closer. The smirk on his face said it was a dare.
“Okay, flight, looking good. Remember to keep the turns very, very wide. I don’t want to see any bunching up,” said the Colonel.
“Not in the turn, Mason.”
I nodded. I saw only the vertical space between our rotors. The rest of the world did not exist. When their ship bounced up in an air pocket, my hand flicked us up at the same time. I saw I could hold the space, so overlapping would be easy. I moved slowly in as we began the turn.
“Okay. Okay. You did it. Now get back,” said Gary.
Connors knew what I was doing and flew as smooth as silk. We made the whole turn with our rotors overlapped by two or three feet. As we came out of the bank, I slid away, and breathed again. “I can’t believe you like to do shit like that,” Gary said, disgusted.
“What’s so funny?” Riker said, inside the C-123.
“Nothing. Just thinking about the fly-by.”
“Fucking waste of time, that was.”
“Yeah,” I said. But I was already thinking about the assault we did in Bong Son. When we got back from our sweep around Dak To, our company was sent over to Bong Son to help the 227th. The VC were retaking the valley we had won two months before. During the briefing at the Rifle Range, the officer in charge said, “So make sure your gas masks are working okay. We’ll be using CS and tear gas on this assault.”
There were murmurs in our crowd. Gas masks? What gas masks?
Outside, the CO had a quick inventory done and found that we had enough masks for exactly half the men. One pilot in each ship and one of the gunners would have to go without.
“Why don’t we just go back and get some more?” somebody asked.
“Not enough time,” said the CO.
Resler and I and our two crew members stood next to the ship looking at the two masks. Resler produced a coin. The crew chief and gunner flipped. The crew chief won.
“Heads or tails?” Resler grinned confidently. He never lost.
“Heads.”
He flipped.
“Heads.”
As it turned out, the gas was diffuse where we landed, and we took only one round as we left. But I remember Resler sitting on his side of the cockpit grimacing, tears flowing, yelling on the intercom, “Shit! Goddamn!”
The plane banked hard. Out the window I could see the outskirts of the big city. “About time,” said Riker. “You really enjoyed this flight. You’ve been grinning the whole way down.”
“Yeah. I guess I have. It’s just that I’m so happy to be leaving the Cav.”
“Yeah. Course, you don’t know what kind of unit your new one is yet.”
The hotel we got to was a place Riker had heard of. I don’t remember its name or where it was. That’s partly because we had had a good meal and several drinks that night and got to the hotel after dark.
The hallway was narrow, and the ceilings were twelve feet high. The place was dark and dingy and the clerk uninterested when we checked in. The Vietnamese were getting used to us, it seemed, and they didn’t like what they saw. The clerk gave us a key and pointed down the dark hallway.
“Some joint, Riker.”
“Guy I know says it’s a great place. Big rooms, low prices.”