“That’s the truth.”
The unit told us to wait. There was a small firefight going on.
I circled high over the valley, out of small-arms range. From the orbit, we could see some smoke up in the north where we had worked that morning. To the west was more smoke from some 101st units who were moving in that direction. The Americans were working a very large section of territory, but from up high it seemed very small. The sea of jungle stretched for hundreds of miles in every direction. And you could go anywhere you wanted under that canopy.
“Okay, Prospector, we’re secure.”
“Roger, we’re on our way,” called Gary.
From the orbit, I dropped toward the peak of the hill, dropped below it, and settled into a descent along a ravine that led to the nook. We had picked up a load of ammo on the way and could barely hover at this altitude. I had to time the approach so that I lost translational lift as the ship moved onto the ledge. When we were moving at maybe 30 miles an hour, with 100 yards to go, our right-door gun exploded. The gunner saw muzzle flashes. With 50 feet to go, the most critical part of the approach, the ground guide started waving me away.
This was no place to stop.
I kept coming. Then two more men jumped up and waved me away. At the same time, a voice on the radio yelled, “Don’t land. We’re under heavy fire!”
This was a new one for me. Normally, I could just fly over the LZ if we had to abort. But this one was on the side of a hill. Enclosed on both sides by the ravine, T couldn’t turn away either. But there was space behind and below us. I flared the ship to stop the approach Since it couldn’t hover, it began to sink. Nose high, the ship slid tail-down into the ravine. As we fell, I used the right pedal to bring the nose around, but I let it continue to fall, to get airspeed. I accelerated into the ravine. The airspeed came up to about 70. Then we were a flying machine again, and I swooped up between some trees on the ridge beside the ravine. The grunts had seen us tumbling into the ravine. We disappeared as the ravine turned, and they thought we crashed. But lo! the Huey jumped out of the jungle, to their amazement.
We finally got back to the nook, dropped the ammo, and picked up the rest of the wounded. As usual with the last trip, some dead men also rode back with us.
That afternoon, I took Gary with me to pick up the ice.
13. Tell Me You’re Afraid
I am sure we are going to win.
A Communist military takeover in South Vietnam is no longer just improbable… it is impossible.
July—August 1966
Sleep no longer gave me peace. I had escaped Vietnam with an R&R to Hong Kong, but I had not escaped my memories.
Twenty-one men lay trussed in a row, ropes at their ankles, hands bound under their backs—North Vietnamese prisoners. A sergeant stood at the first prisoner’s feet, his face twisted with anger. The North Vietnamese prisoner stared back, unblinking. The sergeant pointed a .45 at the man. He kicked the prisoner’s feet suddenly. The shock of the impact jostled the prisoner inches across the earth. The sergeant fired the .45 into the prisoner’s face. The prisoner’s head bounced off the ground like a ball slapped from above, then flopped back into the gore that had been his brains. The sergeant turned to the next prisoner in the line.
“He tried to get away,” said a voice at my side.
“He can’t get away; he’s tied!”
“He moved. He was trying to get away.”
The next prisoner said a few hurried words in Vietnamese as the sergeant stood over him. When the sergeant kicked his feet, the prisoner closed his eyes. A bullet shook his head.
“It’s murder!” I hissed to the man at my side.
“They cut off Sergeant Rocci’s cock and stuck it in his mouth. And five of his men,” said the voice. “After they spent the night slowly shoving knives into their guts. If you had been here to hear the screams…. They screamed all night. This morning they were all dead, all gagged with their cocks. This isn’t murder; it’s justice.”
Another head bounced off the ground. The shock wave hit my body.
“They sent us to pick up twenty-one prisoners,” I pleaded.
“You’ll get ‘em; you’ll get ’em. They’ll just be dead, is all.”
The sergeant moved down the line stopping prisoners who tried to escape. The line of men grew longer than it had been, and the sergeant grew distant. His face glowed red and the heads bounced. And then he looked up at me.
Forgotten events dogged my sleep.
A wounded VC lay on a stretcher, one end rested on my ship’s deck, the other end held by a medic.
“I don’t think he appreciates this. I think he’d rather die,” said the medic.
The VC stared at me. His black eyes accused me. He lay in a black pajama top—the bottoms were gone. He had a swollen, stinking thigh wound from days before. He’d been hiding in the jungle.
“He’s going to lose that leg,” said the medic.
The man stared at me. The stretcher grated against the deck as the medic shoved. The crew chief reached across from the other side and pulled. They slid the stretcher up against the cockpit seats. While they shoved and jostled the stretcher, he kept his eyes on mine.
“That fucker either has the clap or he’s turned on by us.” The crew chief grinned. He pointed to the man’s groin. What looked like semen dripped from his penis and glistened on his thigh. I looked away, feeling his hate. I felt his exposure. I looked back to his eyes and they stared, black and hot. The scene stopped. I thought I was waking up. But then it was the human shield I’d seen during LZ Dog.
The eyes blinked and wrinkles formed at their edges. The old woman with black teeth said something to me, then screamed. There was no sound. Her wrinkled hand held a child’s smooth arm. The child hung lifeless and dragged the old woman down. She moved slowly, like she was falling through water. The crowd around her gasped silently and flinched and fell. The machine gun stuttered from a distant place. The woman fell slowly to the ground, bounced, dying and dead. The old woman had been saying something. When I saw her lips moving, I knew that she had been saying “It’s okay….”
The scene changed again. I sat in my Huey waiting for the grunts to finish inspecting a napalmed village.
“It’s okay.” A man looked in my cockpit window.
“She’s dead!”
“They’re all dead. It’s okay.”
The crowd was gone. I sat in my cockpit while the man talked to me from outside. The place had been a village. The wet ground smoked. Scorched poles and mud-daubed walls and thatch smoldered. Charred people lay twenty feet away. The smell of burnt hair and smoldering charcoal sank into my lungs and brain.
Why was there barbed wire in the village? Was it a pen? A defense perimeter? I couldn’t see the scene beyond where the child stuck to the wire.
“This is wrong,” I said to the man.
“It’s okay. It’s the way it is. They had their warning. Everybody else left the village. They’re VC.”
“She’s VC?”
The man looked down. “No. She’s unfortunate.”
She was burned to the barbed wire. The wire was growing from the charred flesh of her tiny chest. She was bent over the wire, a toddler who had run away from the hell from the sky. The lower half of her two-year-old body was pink from intense heat; her tiny vulva looked almost alive.