Robert Mason - Chickenhawk

“Sorry, you’re totally blocked up. If I let you fly, it’ll only get worse. Check back in a couple of days.”

In a damp mist a hundred men pulled the bulky GPs from the trucks and began setting them up while the ships were out on a mission. In less than an hour, the flat, grassy field outside Camp Holloway was transformed into a tent city. Water bags, called “lister bags,” were set up on tripods; the mess tent was put together; and while the men stacked C-ration boxes around the sides, the cooks started the evening meal.

While all this was going on, I wandered around and made sure that the baggage for our company got put in the appropriate tents. Then I had nothing to do but deal with my thoughts. I sat on my cot alone in the dank GP and drank coffee and smoked cigarettes. I was tortured by conflicting feelings. The Bobbsey Creeps were the only other pilots on the ground, reinforcing my misery.

At the first sound of the returning ships, I went outside and watched. The Hueys snaked out of the mist and with increasing noise gathered on the field west of the camp. Huey after Huey hovered to a landing. The field became a complicated, dance of whirling rotor blades, swinging fuselages, and swirling mist. The roaring rush of the turbines died, and the rotors swung lazily as the ships shut down. The crew wandered up to the camp. They all had come back.

I felt like an abandoned child seeing his family again. Soon the tent was filled with the usual sounds.

“Hey, Nate, the next time you cut me out like that, I‘ll—”

“Fuck you, Connors. If you’d been watching what you were doing, you’d have kept your distance.

“Jesus Christ! I don’t know who’s worse, you or the Cong.”

It was nice to hear.

My ten days on the ground seemed interminable. Our battalion spent two more days at the Turkey Farm before packing up to go north to Kontum. Again I rode in the convoy.

We found an old French barracks that the Vietnamese had been using as stables and chicken coops. After a lot of cleaning up, this became our Kontum camp. I saw the flight surgeon each morning, and each morning he continued my treatment of drugs and no flying.

Finally, after two days at Kontum, I was put back on flight status. Riker and I were assigned to fly together. As I walked out to the flight line, I felt weightless with joy. My work had become my home, and I was glad to be back.

The ships were shadows in the early-morning mist. We took off singly to join up out of the fog. Climbing over vague trees, we saw the earth disappear. Riker, who knew where we were going, told me to turn left. Just as I did we saw the phantom of a Huey cross immediately in front of us. I lurched back on the controls, but that was not what saved us from a midair collision. Luck had been with us.

The mission was to resupply the searching patrols. We followed three other ships thirty miles up to Dak To, separated, and flew west to one of our patrols.

We shut down while the grunts dragged out insulated cases of hot food. A sergeant came over and invited us to join them for breakfast. We did. Hot reconstituted scrambled eggs, bacon, white toast, and coffee. We sat on the Huey’s deck and ate silently. The mist was beginning to burn off, and the dark shadows around us grew taller, revealing themselves as mountains.

The platoon leader, a skinny second lieutenant, came over and shot the shit for a while.

“Find anything?” Riker asked.

“Just some old campsites.” The lieutenant patted his blouse for cigarettes. I offered him a Pall Mall. “Thanks.”

“We hear that the VC don’t want to fight the Cav.”

“Can’t blame them, can you?” said the lieutenant. “Every time they do, we clobber the shit out of them.”

Yeah, as long as we have helicopters, Phantoms, and B-52 bombers, I thought. I said, “Maybe the war is almost over.”

“Maybe. They keep talking about peace negotiations all the time. Johnson’s got ‘em in a bind up north, and we’re putting the squeeze on ’em down here. They might just see that it’s impossible to win.”

“Yeah,” said Riker. “I don’t see how the little fucks can go on much longer. McNamara says we’re due out of here in less than a year. Some people say that we might not even serve a complete tour, could end that quick.”

“Might be,” said the lieutenant. “At least we know we own Dak To.”

“We have a guy in our company, named Wendall, says that that’s what they did with the French,” I said.

“Did what?” said the lieutenant.

“Made them think they’re winning, let them set up camps and stuff, and then bam!”

“Totally different war now.” The lieutenant flipped his cigarette out to the dew-covered ground. “The French couldn’t get around like we can.” He patted the Huey’s deck. “Machines like this make all the difference. How’d you like to be a guerrilla trying to fight an army that can be anywhere, anytime?”

“You got a point there, all right,” I said. “Wendall’s a flake anyway.”

“Sounds like it,” the lieutenant said.

“Yep,” said Riker, “I can see it now. Get home early, get laid, and then put the baggage down.”

“Well, I’m back to work. Take it easy.” The lieutenant smiled and walked back over to his men. “Phillips. Get some men to load those food boxes on the Huey.”

“What’s next?” I asked Riker.

“We’re supposed to go back and drop this shit off and then we fly some refugees somewhere.”

Black pajamas, conical hats, pigs trussed in baskets, chickens that watched with upright heads on upside-down bodies, wide-eyed kids, crying babies, rolled-up rice mats, staffs, bundled firewood, and warped metal-clad boxes that stayed together by faith alone were packed into the Huey.

“What a menagerie,” grumbled Riker. A pig squealed as the turbine whined. I turned around and saw a young mother with a baby’s face pressed to her breast as she watched us with saucer eyes. I nodded to her and smiled. She nodded quickly and smiled back. God, they are scared, I thought. How would I feel if foreigners made me and my family get on a strange contraption to fly me from my home to who knows where?

“Winning their hearts and minds,” I said.

“Ain’t that a crock,” said Riker.

We flew north, past Dak To and the border junction of Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. The mountains were the tallest I had ever seen. Misty clouds blanketed this wet, green world.

We were in our slot, one of ten ships, as the flight followed valleys to stay out of the clouds. Past a dark peak that lost its top in the whiteness, a red, freshly cut airstrip appeared in the valley below. New huts with tin roofs were clustered defensively within a sandbagged, wire-topped compound wall. Welcome home, I thought. Eyes in the back watched intently as the flight drifted out of the misty sky to land on the red earth.

Little ARVN soldiers with slung rifles urged them out of the ship. A frightened mother looked back inside to two small kids. A soldier grabbed a pig and tossed it to a pile of rope-trussed belongings. It screamed noiselessly in our hissing, and squirmed like a living sausage. One of the kids screamed tearfully. His frantic mom snatched him quickly off the deck to sit on her hip. He grabbed her blouse tightly as she ducked our rotors and stumbled to her things.

I watched her as we left. She grew smaller as we climbed. Soon she was only a memory, confused and frightened, alone and far away from her family’s ancient home. At that moment I hated Communists and was ashamed to be an American. But then I had often been accused of being too sensitive.

We continued relocating refugees all the next day. We were supposed to finish our sweep at this end of the Ia Drang valley and then go home to the Golf Course. By dusk, though, we were landing the last load of people at one of the new villages. The old man decided to stay out and head back in the morning.