A half mile away, it was over for us. That was it—one load to the ridge. I cruised the five miles back to the camp, steaming.
“I’ve never seen anything like that. How the fuck are they going to win this stupid war if they fight like that!”
Sky King nodded gravely and said nothing. He’d worked with ARVNs before.
When we landed, I thanked the crew chief, Blakely, for using his brains and getting the ARVNs off.
“Any time, sir. Next time I’ll do it sooner.” He grinned. We all went around the ship to count hits. There was one. It was hard to believe that they had shot down a Phantom and missed us as we parked on the ridge, but that was the way it was.
“Lucky, lucky, lucky,” said Sky King.
“Astounding,” I said.
We walked back to the Ops tent and waited for the rest of the gaggle to return.
“Wolfe just got hit,” said Maj. Richard Ramon, the operations officer, as we walked inside. “Friend of yours, isn’t he?” He looked at me.
“Yes, sir. A classmate.”
“Well, he got his arm messed up. He’ll be here in a minute.” He shook his head. “Hell of a way to start the day.”
I kept seeing ARVN asses glued to the deck of my ship.
“Daring’s boys are out there now trying to get that gun position,” said Ramon. “And we had a slick and a gun out looking for the air-force pilot.”
“One?” I asked.
“Yeah, your friend Resler picked him up, the other guy never got out. Poor bastard.”
Two more Hueys cruised in fast, low level, down the airstrip. When they landed, Wolfe staggered out, helped by the crew chief. He held his arm across his chest, dripping blood down his pants. Doc DaVinci met them half way and walked them to the tent. Wolfe was pale, as if all his blood had drained out of his arm. He smiled blankly at me as Doc used scissors to cut his sleeve away.
“Fuckers shot my smokes!” exclaimed Wolfe. With his arm down, we could see that his chest-protector pocket was blown away, revealing the ceramic strata beneath the green cloth. The round had torn through his right forearm and blasted into his chest protector.
“Do you see that? The fuckers blew away my smokes!”
I nodded and handed him a lit cigarette.
“Can you move your fingers?” asked Doc.
“Sure.” Wolfe puffed the smoke.
“Well, move them.”
“I am.”
Doc looked at Wolfe. “I think you’re going to get home on this one.”
“I told you, Mason! A bone wound will do it every time.”
I raised a weak smile. “You got it right.”
Doc wrapped Wolfe’s arm in a bunch of bandages while Sky King and I went back out to the flight line to get the ship ready. We were going to fly him to Pleiku.
During the flight, Wolfe chain-smoked cigarettes handed him by the crew chief. When I dropped him at the hospital at Pleiku, his color was better and he was smiling like a man who just won a lottery. He had landed right after me in the same spot on the ridge. I almost wished it had been the other way around.
Later that day, Sky King and I flew out to lift a load of grunts from the 101st—to rescue the ARVNs—and back. We had experienced fairly heavy fire the second time out, but no hits. Meanwhile, Daring’s gun platoon was swooping all around the hill, trying to get at the emplacement. It seemed impossible that the gooks could last through the Phantom strike and a whole gunship platoon, but they had. When the sun dropped behind the ridge, the guns came back one by one. They had taken many hits. Two pilots had been wounded and were taken immediately to Pleiku.
“Where the fuck is Seven-oh-two?” Major Ramon asked no one in particular. A group of us sat around in the operations tent listening to the radios: 702 was the last of the gunships out there. He had called five minutes before that he had been hit, but then there was silence.
“Let’s get somebody back out there.” Ringknocker spoke from the tent door. “Maybe he forgot how to get back here.” He frowned at his own joke.
Then we all heard the familiar whopping of rotors, and in the dusky light we saw the ship skid across the dirt fast and slide to a stop on the strip.
“Fancy landing,” somebody said.
With a collective sigh of relief, the crowd began to break up. I stopped outside with some others because something odd was happening with 702. Nobody was getting out. The ship just stood there hissing. Its rotors swung lazily. Somebody ran over to the ship and started waving frantically, calling for Doc. All four people on board were unconscious from wounds.
While they loaded the crew of 702 on a slick going to Pleiku, I walked back to the tent. Stoddard was showing Resler a six-foot section of a Huey tail-rotor drive-shaft tube. As I got closer, I could see a bullet hole in the tube.
“My first hit,” said Stoddard proudly.
Resler nodded agreeably but cautiously. Stoopy had taken the hit early in the day and had had the crew chief give him the ungainly trophy.
“Going to take this thing back home,” said Stoopy.
I was feeling kind of guilty for thinking that Stoopy was a jerk. He was… just a little too exuberant, or something.
“You’re a moron,” said Resler. I laughed for a long while.
“So, this is the deal.” Sky King talked as we sat in the mess tent. “Ice.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Ice, man.” Sky King’s eyes gleamed in the light of the mess tent’s bare bulb. Our generator grumbled and popped in a hole fifty feet away.
“This is the business deal you were talking about?”
“That’s it, kimo sabe. Ringknocker’s agreed. We start taking a ship down to Kontum every day and load it up with ice. You know, big blocks of ice. We bring it back here and sell it to our own mess, the company’s beer tent, and the rest we unload to the grunts at the 101st. We’ll charge the grunts enough to pay for our ice. Nice deal, eh? The Prospectors get free ice.”
“We have an ice machine.”
“We do, but it only makes chipped ice. And just barely enough for drinks. We’re talking about big twenty-five-kilo blocks of ice to cool the beer. Besides, there’ll be a profit, and we can use the money for the club. What do you think?”
“What do you want me to do?” I said.
“Just volunteer to fly down with me every day.”
“Sure. Why not?”
“Exactly. Partner.”
We couldn’t land a Huey in downtown Kontum to get ice. Sky King had arranged for a truck from a nearby Special Forces camp. The deal was that we could use their truck and driver if we let them use our Huey and a pilot.
On the first day of the ice business, Sky King took the truck into town while I flew the Special Forces CO—a lieutenant named Bricklin—on his jungle patrol. We covered his normal route through the scrub and jungle at low level in twenty minutes. The same trip via ankle express took him and his Chinese mercenaries a full day to complete. Naturally, he couldn’t see much from a speeding helicopter, nothing like what he could’ve seen had he walked, but he could honestly report that he had covered the entire route. This made him and his men very happy.
Only fifteen or twenty of the two hundred men at this camp were Americans. The rest were Chinese mercenaries from Saigon. When we landed back at the compound, Bricklin pointed out the arrangement, indicating that that side was for the Chinese, this for the Americans.
Bricklin was a tall and lean Montanan. He—like most of the Special Forces—was of the old school concerning the proper way to handle the war. Charlie was treated somewhat like a band of mischievous outlaws whose chances of actually taking over the country were nonexis tent. Bricklin believed that with the Americans dominating the Kontum area, the people would eventually come to trust the Americans and their ways, especially if the Americans educated their children and supplied medical care and other material goodies that even backward peasants come to crave when they are exposed to them.