“Delta Company, 227th,” announced Cannon.
“From right around the corner,” I said. “Nice meeting you.”
Cannon just nodded, looking worried.
“Yep. Cannon flew guns in the Cav,” said Ringknocker. “But in our company, we assign pilots to the guns by their weight. You now how weak those B models are, especially loaded up with ammo. So all our gunship pilots are skinny fucks, like you.”
A shock hit my body. That’s why Cannon looked so worried. Ringknocker was making him fly slicks. And he was going to make me fly guns.
“What’s the matter?” Ringknocker said, reading my face.
“I fly slicks.”
“Yeah, and I fly guns,” Cannon interjected.
Ringknocker lowered his eyebrows to a more official level. “Well, my policy is skinny guys in the guns, fat guys in the slicks. Besides, I don’t know what you’re worried about, Mason. Guns are a lot safer than slicks. Most of our hits are taken by the slicks. In the guns you at least have something to shoot back with.”
A Phantom roared on takeoff.
Daring changed a line: “Sky troopers sailing through the air…”
“I’ve flown six hundred hours of combat time as a slick pilot. All my experience is in slicks. And I’m still alive. I don’t want to change anything I’m doing at this stage of the game.”
“That goes for me, too,” said Cannon. “I’m still alive, and I don’t want to change nothing.”
“Six hundred hours?” Ringknocker looked impressed.
“That’s right.”
“Shit,” he said, “the most anybody, even Deacon, has in our company is three hundred.” Ringknocker tapped his ring on the table. “Flew your ass off, hey?”
“Yeah, and I understand slick flying.”
“And I understand guns,” said Cannon.
“Shit!” Ringknocker looked dismayed. “I have my policies, you know.” Cannon sat back in his chair, looking pissed off. I was thinking, Another fucking book man.
“Okay, okay, all right, fuck it,” said Ringknocker. “Fuck my policy. Cannon, you fly guns. Mason, you fly slicks.” Ringknocker grinned. “And that’s an order.”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“It’s a deal,” said Cannon.
“Settin’ our traps to catch them bears…” droned Daring.
“No, no, no.” Ringknocker suddenly leaned into the circle of songwriters. “Horrible, horrible, horrible.”
Sky King dropped to his knees, holding his hands on his ears. “I’m sick!” he yelled. He humped over and retched loudly.
“Look. We get a decent song, we get invited to Saigon for two days in the sing-off,” Ringknocker announced. “You wanna have two days to fuck off in Saigon, don ‘cha?”
I sat there dumbfounded as Ringknocker explained. A sing-off? Song contest? Cannon, arms folded across his chest, looked at me and shook his head. These guys are strange.
The songwriters argued; then Daring strummed once more. This time three other guys, out of the twenty in the club, sang along. While they sang I noticed something moving on the wall. A human skull mounted above the bar moved its jaw, clacking along with the song. Sky King was pulling the string that led from the skull to the end of the bar. “Sing it, Charlie!” he yelled.
“Charlie?” I said to Red.
“Yeah, Doc made him from a VC head we brought in.”
I nodded. What else would you call a VC head?
The song ended.
“Puke,” said Deacon.
“You really think so?” Ringknocker asked with a worried look. Deacon was one of the two platoon leaders in the Prospectors. He was also the company’s IP and part-time sage. He wore a graying flattop over a smooth and sincere face. Ringknocker trusted him implicitly.
“Yes,” said Deacon.
“Well,” Ringknocker shook his head, “we’ll just have to keep trying.”
The Prospectors left at dawn. I stayed behind with another warrant named Staglioni. We were to bring out a slick that was being repaired.
Staglioni told me that four or five ships in the company were already out in the field at Nhon Co. “That’s what we usually do. We have some guys go ahead and set up camp while the rest of us come back here to take a break.” Staglioni was tall and soft and dark. His accent was New York to me.
“Flatbush. That’s in Brooklyn,” he said.
“So, we just wait until the ship is ready and then fly out?”
“That’s it. Maintenance told me it should be ready tomorrow morning.”
We watched a flight of four Phantoms take off. When they hit their afterburners on the climb-out, it was like thunder. “Looks like fun.” I said.
“It is,” said Staglioni. “I tried it once.”
“You flew a Phantom?”
“Yeah. You could, too, if you wanted. They come over here all the time. They like to trade flight time.”
“They want to fly Hueys?”
“Yeah. They’re all the time betting that they can hover a chopper first time up.”
“I bet they can’t.”
“You’re right. None of them have so far. One of their pilots even flew a mission with us one day. He hated it. He felt like we were too close to everything, you know, right down in it. They really don’t see much on their strikes. They aim at puffs of smoke in the jungle, drop their shit, and bam, they’re back home. Their total time in the air from takeoff to landing is one hour and twenty minutes. It’s a quickie. Then they hop in an air-conditioned van and cruise back to the club. And that’s it for the day. A hundred missions and they go home.” He paused for a minute while a Phantom came in for a landing. “Can you imagine? A hundred missions? Shit, I’d be back home twice already.”
“You guys log missions?”
“No, not officially. I keep my own log. The last time I told one of the air-force guys how many missions I’d flown, he said, ‘What do you expect? The smart pilots are in the air force.’ That fucker.”
I watched another Phantom take off. If I had stayed in college, I lamented, I would be flying those and living on the other side of the runway.
“It’s true,” I said.
“What is?”
“The smart pilots are in the air force.”
The camp was a dirty-fabric ghost town. The trail that led from the club past the row of ten GPs was completely deserted. Staglioni went to his tent and I went to mine.
I wrote Patience a letter to bring her up to date and give her my new address.
A Vietnamese woman dressed in black pajamas ducked in through the tent flaps. She nodded as she walked by. She walked to the other end of the tent and began to sweep the dirt floor with a bamboo whisk broom, drawing neat parallel lines in the dust. When she got to me she bowed slightly and then waited expectantly for me to raise my feet off the plywood platform. I raised my feet and she swept under them. Then she began making up the beds. There were four in the GP. When she got to me again, she bowed. Her smile was black from betel nut, and she waited for me to get up. I jumped up.
“Oh,” I said.
“Ah,” she said. She stripped the whole cot, remade it, and carefully rearranged my gear. Folded flak vest here, .45 and its holster on top there, just so. She stood back and shared with me her artistic arrangement and nodded that I could place my ass back on the blanket.
“Thank you,” I said.
She grinned betel black and ducked outside.
So, even if the army had drawn the dreary side of the field and the dreary domiciles, Ringknocker had gone to some lengths, allowing some luxuries to brighten the dreariness. I hadn’t seen anything yet.
I walked back and forth in the tent for a while. I ducked outside to watch a Phantom take off and nodded to a passing hooch maid. I wanted to go talk to Staglioni, but he had said he was in the middle of a good book. I remembered mine. I was in the middle of the second volume of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Gollum was slithering down cliffs head first as he followed Bilbo. I identified with Gollum and loved his voice. “Yesss,” he said. I tried talking that way back in the Cav: “Yesss, we likes to go on missionssss.” But people thought I was developing a lisp. No one knew who Gollum was. The most popular books were James Bond adventures.