Robert Mason - Chickenhawk

“Why?”

“Well, if you have to squeeze too hard to pull the trigger, it throws off your aim.”

“Oh. Great.” LaRoe had the gun wavering a foot from my face, waiting, I suppose, for me to take it to admire. I didn’t. He moved back suddenly and I heard a click-clack. I turned and saw him pulling the magazine out of the handle.

“Try it, sir. You won’t believe how light it is. I filed away a lot of the metal.”

“That’s okay, LaRoe, I believe you. I’m sure it’s a great little weapon, all right.”

“C‘mon, sir. Just dry-shoot it once.” LaRoe pushed the gun my way, holding up the magazine as he did. “Here, I just cleared it.”

I was thinking about how much LaRoe probably liked it here with all the real guns and bullets around. I should’ve thought more about how he had given me the gun.

It was cocked, so I held it gingerly, though I knew it was empty. I pointed it up and looked for a target. I had never been good with pistols, rifles being my forte. The sights wavered. A Huey lined up, fragmented by the water drops. I moved the aim away from the ship, an automatic precaution. The Colonel’s back filled my sights. It was really crowded out there. So I continued to sight, holding the gun now with two hands, moving it around to find a clear, though dry, shot. I settled on one of the gauges on the instrument panel in front of me. I thought about pulling the trigger, and the gun exploded, slapping back against my hand. The gauge shattered and disappeared. I went deaf and into shock at the same time. Holding the gun in front of me, watching the smoke curl lazily out of the barrel, I considered turning around and killing LaRoe. However, the gun really was empty now.

I calmly passed the gun back to him. His face was white. “Nice trigger pull, Sergeant. No doubt about it.”

A small crowd had gathered around the front of my Huey to examine the exit wound in the ship and the small crater in the mud where it finally stopped. The Colonel watched with his arms folded as I climbed out. The thought balloon next to his head read, “Dumb shit.” Williams just sat in his seat behind him, glaring.

Up to that point I was just beginning to feel accepted by the old salts. Shit.

Williams did not say a word until we got back to the company after the mission. Before evening chow he sent Owens, the operations officer, to fetch me.

“Major Williams wants to see you in his tent.” Hee, hee.

“That was the dumbest, stupidest, most moronic move I have ever seen in my life,” Williams said. But he did not

say I was an asshole.

“But—”

“There is absolutely no excuse for a supposedly intelligent pilot to play with a gun like you did.”

“But—” I was trying to blame it on LaRoe.

“If you ever shoot up one of my helicopters again, I’ll have your hide. You got that, mister?” He was a little tense, so I decided to go along with him.

“Yes, sir.” I saluted on the way out.

Just to rub it in, they hung the remains of the omni-gauge—a radio-navigation instrument—in the operations tent. A little note was attached to one of the uncoiled springs explaining that it was the victim of the first shot fired at the Cav from inside one of its own helicopters.

The airfield south of the Cav was built by the French, and the Cav considered it part of their property. We occupied the airfield and the land around it, including an area on the nearby riverbank that was the site for our new shower station. The Cav engineers had set up a group of special water-processing trucks next to the river. They pumped the water through self-contained devices that chemically treated, filtered, and heated the water before pumping it inside adjoining GP tents equipped with wooden-slat floors and a dozen shower heads. About six of these trucks and tents made up the bathing area.

The first time I heard somebody yell “Shower call” I thought I was hearing things. Showers were something the advisers took in their established compounds and Special Forces camps. Sure, people in Saigon, Qui Nhon, Nha Trang, and Pleiku took showers, but weren’t they tourists? Until now, the Cav’s brass seemed to feel that the dirtier we got, the more depressed we became, which made us madder, which made us chop stumps harder, or something like that. Anyway, we were generally filthy, so the words themselves were a touch of comfort.

The day after I shot out the omni-gauge, twenty-five of us were packed into the back of a deuce-and-a-half, smelling ripe, on the way to the shower station.

Connors had actually taken a liking to me after the incident with the gun. For him, liking someone meant including that someone in a cynical observation.

“So, Bob, did the omni-gauge make a move toward you first, or did you just ambush it?” I was on the floor with my back to the cab. Connors and Banjo sat jammed together on the bench beside me. Resler sat next to me. He started to laugh at Connors’s remark.

“Yeah, Bob,” said my supposed friend Gary, “did it give you any warning before it attacked? Like moving its pointer or something?”

“Look, Gary,” Connors inexplicably jumped to my defense, “anyone can make a mistake.” I smiled at his generosity. “I mean,” he continued warmly, “how was Mason to know that the gauge was going to come after him like that!”

The truck pulled up. We jumped out, carrying towels and fresh clothes, and ran to the shower tents.

It was luxurious. Hot water filled the tent with steam. I stayed in as long as I could, rinsing away the accumulated grime and rejuvenating my spirits.

“We have got to build one of these back at tent city!” said Marston.

“Can we do that?” I asked.

“Sure. All we have to do is figure out how to get the water,” said Marston. “And the only way I figure we can get to it now is to dig a well by hand. And we’re on high ground, so the well would have to be deep, maybe a hundred feet.”

It sounded impossible to me at the time. We did it a few months later.

After washing, we wandered around outside the tents drying in the sun and getting dressed. I sat in the sun for a few minutes, naked. The hot water had soothed my muscles. The sun seemed to radiate energy into my body. I was completely relaxed.

I was idly watching two guys from another company as they walked near a shower tent about a hundred feet from me when they disappeared in a shattering explosion.

With the noise, I reflexively looked out to the perimeter. Who? What? Are we being attacked? My throat tightened with fear.

Not VC. Not a stray mortar round. Nothing we were prepared for. The two cleanly scrubbed grunts had made a final discovery: land mines last and last. At least eleven years, anyway. The French had heavily mined the airfield before they were driven from An Khe, in 1954.

They put the showers off limits for a few days while men from demolition burned the weeds and grass away with flame throwers and swept the area with mine detectors. Mines were found and blown up, and the spot was declared safe again.

Flying out to Happy Valley became a daily routine. It didn’t seem to make much difference, unless you happened to be one of the Americans killed during these few weeks. Or one of the supposedly three hundred VC. Then it made a lot of difference. To the rest of us, the ones alive, the result of our daily grind was fatigue and irritability.

Wendall said that the VC were bending with the force to learn more about how the Cav operated. He may have been right. They seemed to control the situation. We wanted them to stand and fight and they wouldn‘t—very frustrating for the “First Team.”

To prove they controlled the valley, they not only would know which LZ we were going to use and greet us there but would also wait until we were in the middle of an extraction to shoot again. In between it was snipers from shadows.