While I read, something went wrong with my brain. Something had to be wrong, because instead of lying back with the book on my lap, the book was on the dirt floor and I was reaching for my .45 and saying, “What?”
“What?” I roamed the tent, looking in corners. I looked outside.
“What?” Something was very wrong. I was tense. I was ready. I waited.
A dark head pushed through the flaps. That? As I drew my pistol, I saw it was Staglioni. “Chow,” he said, and ducked back outside. He had not seen my gun. Abruptly the feeling of impending doom passed. A danger was past. What the danger had been I didn’t know, but it was gone. I holstered the .45 and walked to the mess hall.
I sat at a table with Staglioni and two air-force pilots from across the base. All during the meal I kept worrying about what I had just done. There wasn’t anything wrong. It’s me. I’m going crazy.
“Wanna try it?” The air-force lieutenant asked.
“Try what?”
“Fly a Phantom.”
“I fly slicks.”
“I know. You wanna trade a ride?” He looked at me quizzically.
“No.”
The Huey was not ready the next day. Or the next. Each day I waited, the routine was much the same. Breakfast, read, lunch, read, dinner, read, sleep. The routine was punctuated by moments of nonspecific terror. I spent my nights hopping up out of bed looking for the source of my fears. One afternoon, while I read at a table in the club, I blacked out. One moment I was reading normally; the next thing I knew my face was resting on the pages. That scared me into taking my tortured soul over to the flight surgeon on the air-force side of the base.
“I have these dizzy spells, I keep waking up at night thinking that I’m dying, and yesterday my face fell into my book,” I shamefully admitted.
“Take off your clothes,” said the doctor, with sympathetic fascination.
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“I’m going to give you a neurological examination.”
And he did. He poked me with pins, scraped my soles, tapped my elbows and knees. He had me follow fingers and lights with my eyes, stand on one foot, and touch my fingertips with my eyes closed. And when he finally looked into my eyes with his ophthalmoscope, he said,
“Hmmm.”
“Find something?” I asked.
“Nope. Nothing at all. All your circuits check out fine.”
“So why am I having these blank spells and dizziness?”
“I don’t know.”
I sagged with dissappointment.
“It could be a couple of things,” he added hastily. “You might have a rare form of epilepsy, which I doubt. Or you’re suffering from stress. I would think that with the kind of job you have, it’s stress. But I suggest you check with your own flight surgeon when you get to see him. If you keep having the symptoms, they’ll probably ground you.”
Four days after I had arrived, a week after leaving the Cav, I joined my new unit in the field at Nhon Co.
The Prospectors’ ships were parked in a narrow airstrip cut into the jungle by the French. The camp was up on a hill next to the strip. I carried my gear up and found Deacon, and he showed me to one of the twenty six-sided tents scattered around the sandy, weedy dunes at the top of the hill. My tentmates were two warrants, Monk and Stoopy Stoddard.
“Hey, a new guy,” said Monk. He looked up from filing magazine clippings in a shoebox. He had square jaws and a compact, sturdy body. “But”—he squinted in the glare of the light behind me—“I’d say you’re not new to Nam.” He was looking at my belt buckle. The green tape that covered it was filthy and almost black, the mark of the veteran.
“That’s right. I’m a transfer from the Cav.”
“Really?” said Stoddard. “The Cav? That’s a tough outfit.” Stoopy was an overweight child of a man who said irritating things like “Gosh” and “Wow!” and even
“Neat.”
I nodded and said, “Can I put my gear over here?” I pointed to the back of the tent.
“Sure,” said Stoddard. I threw my bag against the cloth wall and sat on it. Monk resumed filing his clippings. Ragged copies of Stars and Stripes, Newsweek, Time, and other magazines lay strewn in the dirt around his bedroll. He carefully cut each item with a Swiss army scissors, then flipped through alphabetized index cards to find its proper place.
“Are you a writer?” I asked.
“Monk, a writer?” Stoopy giggled. His belly and fat cheeks shook. I noticed chocolate stains on his lips and then saw the chocolate bar grasped in a grubby hand. “He thinks you’re a writer, Monk.” He laughed brightly. Monk shot him a glance that killed the laughter immediately. Stoopy blinked hard and sat quietly and respectfully.
“No, not yet,” said Monk. “I’m just collecting my material. Someday…” he trailed off, apparently avoiding a touchy subject.
“That’s an impressive amount of stuff you got there.” I nodded at the shoebox.
“Thanks, I’ve got more.” He pointed to four more rubber-banded boxes resting against the tent wall. “Someday… You’d be surprised to know what they’re saying about this war.” He nodded slowly and knowingly. I signaled agreement.
“Well, well, well. Look who’s here,” said a voice from the flap.
“Wolfe!”
“Wow, Mason, what a memory!” We both laughed. Wolfe was a former classmate.
“I didn’t know you were with the Prospectors,” I said.
“I was one of the shmucks that set up this camp. I was out here when you arrived.”
“Well, you picked a nice place.”
“Thanks.”
Monk seemed irritated by Wolfe’s intrusion. He rolled a rubber band off his wrist around the shoebox and stashed it carefully with the others. Then he stood up and squeezed past Wolfe without saying a word. Wolfe ignored him as he left. Apparently they were not friendly.
Wolfe and I talked awhile. He had arrived in-country a month before. He was very impressed that I was a short-timer with only two months to go in my tour. I told him I had been in the Cav and that I had recently talked to some classmates of ours up near Kontum. We shared rumors concerning the whereabouts of the rest of the class and agreed that probably most of them were somewhere in Nam. Somebody called that it was chow time, and Stoopy, whom we had completely ignored, leapt outside. As we emerged from the tent, we saw Monk balanced on his hands, walking up a small sand dune.
“That’s pretty good,” I said as we walked away.
“The guy’s a jerk,” said Wolfe sourly.
That evening I delivered a letter from the air-force doctor to Doc Da Vinci, our flight surgeon. He agreed that it was probably just a stress reaction and gave me some tranquilizers to take. He warned me to use them only at night. I couldn’t fly with them. I slept well that night.
The next morning I was back in the saddle in a Huey. The aircraft commander was my platoon leader, Deacon. We flew three missions of local ass-and-trash, single-ship stuff. Deacon let me do all the flying. In four hours that morning, I landed in a clearing so small I had to hover vertically down, also landed on a tight pinnacle, carried two loads that were so heavy I had to make running takeoffs, and finally joined up with three other ships in a formation flight back to the airstrip. I had been thoroughly checked out.