Bricklin had begun to point out the advantages of the patient method of converting the Vietnamese versus the so-called war of attrition when he saw the Cav’s horse patch on my right shoulder.
“The only trouble with those guys,” said Bricklin, “is they kill a lotta people that just happened to get in the way. Every time a villager or his water buffalo gets killed, the VC boys talk it up real big. ‘See how much the Americans love you?’ they say. ‘Killed old Mrs. Koa yesterday and she was seventy-five and never hurt a bug.’ Course, old Charlie had come through the same village and executed the honchos, but who trusts politicians anyway? These wide-screen raids the Cav and other units are doing are wrecking everything these people have. Sure, they beat the NVA units and the VC units, but they’re ignoring the stomping they’re doing to the people we’re trying to help. And this relocation thing is about equal to dying as far as the villagers are concerned. These people are born, grow up, and die all in the same village—the village of their ancestors. That village is everything to them. So what do we do? We come marching through, burn it down—to keep the VC from occupying it—and move the people out to God knows where and turn them overnight into refugees and welfare cases and honest-to-God American-haters. The VC are winning because we’re losing.” Bricklin had said all that before he popped a beer inside the small metal building they called their club. “Just show ‘em by example. Show the VC how good the American way is, and they’ll come around. These people’ ll go the way that works.”
Bricklin and I sat at a folding table in the small bar. I drank a cup of coffee while he drank beer. I had to fly.
Everything about the place was easygoing. Even the slot machine was easy. The machine’s covers were off; you could see the gears and wheels and the money box. You could reclaim your losses by reaching into the back. Bricklin’s philosophy got me into a political mood.
“Do you think we ought to be here in the first place?” I asked.
“Well, that’s another question altogether, isn’t it? Fact is, we are here.”
“To me it’s the question.”
“You may be right, but things like this are real hard to stop once they get going. I think we’re going to be here a real long time.”
“Do you think we’ll win?”
“Not if we keep bustin’ up the villages and killing the people we’re trying to save, we won’t.”
“A lot of people say that if we had allowed the Vietnamese to have their elections, they would’ve voted for Ho Chi Minh and there wouldn’t be any war.”
Bricklin nodded. “Yeah, I’ve read that, too. And it’s probably true. But like I say, we’re here now.”
“So why can’t we just pull out?”
“Do you think LBJ would ever walk out on this gunfight?”
“No.”
“You’re right,” Bricklin said, and smiled.
The ice truck rolled through the gate and stopped by the bar. Sky King got out and pushed through the screen door. “Man, the prices around here.” He sat down beside me. “Fuckers charge two-fifty for a fifty-pound block. The same thing costs seventy-five cents at Phan Rang.”
“Well, we had the Cav come through here a month ago,” said Bricklin. “Those guys paid whatever the people asked for—ruined them for bargaining. They just don’t understand the locals.” He winked at me.
Sky King had a beer and talked to Bricklin. He told him that the deal was working fine, and if it was okay by him, we’d be coming down every day.
“Just make yourselves at home,” said Bricklin, “and bring your Huey.”
We walked out to the ship as the last of the blocks were put on board. There was a total of twenty blocks—a thousand pounds of ice—packed wetly on the deck. I cranked up. Because of the extra weight, I couldn’t hover up over the flagpole, so I turned the ship around and took off the way we came in.
As we headed up the valley on the thirty-mile flight back to Dak To, Sky King smoked cigarettes, chattered about the business, and nervously watched the cargo melting in the warm, hundred-mile-an-hour wind.
“Shit, we’ll be lucky to get back with half the ice we bought,” he said. “How ‘bout we close the doors?” he asked the crew chief.
“If we do that, sir, we can’t get to our guns,” said the chief.
“Oh, yeah.” He turned to me. “Next trip we got to bring a tarp to put over that stuff.”
He turned around, watching the cargo. “Shit, look at it go! Each one of those drops is a fucking dime!”
“We’re almost there,” I said.
“Thank God. Can you imagine getting back to the company with a fifty-dollar puddle? Ringknocker’d kill me.” He laughed.
I landed on the strip at a spot near the mess hall. A truck pulled out, and the crew began unloading the ice as I shut down. From there it was trucked to one of our
tents, where it entered a complicated distribution system that delivered ice to our company, the nearby engineers, and the 101st before dark.
Being in the ice business gave me the trading material I needed to build a bunker. Both Gary and I were nervous about being mortared. The Prospectors thought we were overreacting. They had never been mortared. We enlisted Stoddard’s help. He was an energetic excavator. Within a day, with Stoopy doing most of the digging, we had a four-by-four hole, six feet deep. While Gary and Stoopy filled sandbags to wall the bunker, I took a Jeep over to the engineers and struck a deal with a captain there. He gave me three sheets of PSP for one block of ice. I took the steel planks, on account, and brought them back. We layered three levels of sandbags on top of them. It was a snug little bunker. And though we knew it probably could not withstand a direct hit, it might, and that gave us great comfort.
Meanwhile, the Prospectors laughed. But Gary and I knew better.
That evening Gary and I sat on our bunker, quietly talking about going home. We were now short-timers with less than seventy days to go.
“They say they’re going to use short-timers only on noncombat missions during their last month.” Gary sipped his daily Budweiser.
“I heard. I think a great plan would be to take a leave ten days before that; when you come back, you’re finished fighting. Just fly rice and stuff around back at Phan Rang.”
“You going to?”
“Yeah, why not? We could both get a leave together. I found some great places in Taipei.”
“I heard it’s better in Hong Kong.”
“It is, eh? Okay, Hong Kong. I’ve never been there. You wanna take a leave there?”
“Yeah.”
By the end of the first week, we had lifted companies of grunts from the 101st into positions at the north end of the valley. They were getting into firefights, but nothing big. We also established an artillery position in the foothills, placed so that it controlled the semicircle in which the 101st fanned out. Intelligence had reported that there was at least a battalion-sized NVA unit out there, and the 101st was eager to make contact.
My schedule was always blank in the afternoons, and I continued flying the ice runs. After a few days, Sky King and I had worked out a procedure in which the one of us who stayed with Bricklin could drink, while the one who went for the ice stayed dry—so that there would be at least one sober pilot to fly back. This made the daily flights more enjoyable. I was beginning to like being a Prospector. They might be eccentric, but they got the job done, and had a good time doing it. And except for the six casualties we experienced on that first day, no one had been hurt. It was, almost, pleasant.