Robert Mason - Chickenhawk

Twenty ships landed on a grassy ridge in the gathering dark. The ridge was the site of a temporary ARVN camp. Two large tents were set up for us.

Riker and I carried our sleeping gear over to the tents. We blew up air mattresses in the light of army flashlights.

Dinner was C’s eaten down by the ships. Riker and Resler sat on the deck eating from cans while I twisted the opener around a tin of chicken. I was pulling the ragged lid away from the chicken meat when the silence was shattered. Whomp! and then ringing. The ringing came from my ears. Nobody announced the obvious: mortars. Cans clanked on the deck and shadows scattered. I dropped my can and ran toward a shallow hole I had seen when we landed. It was only twenty feet away. Whoomm! I saw the bright flash of the round as it exploded a hundred yards away. Dropping to the grass, I low-crawled the rest of the way to the hole. Whoomml It was occupied by two crew members from the ship in front of us. Whoom-whoom! Goddamn! Where am I supposed to go? Whoom! Damn! Real close! I got up and ran back to the ship. The ship was my security. It always got me out of trouble. Whoommm! My shadow flashed against the black u.s. ARMY on the tail boom. I dropped and rolled under the deck. My shoulder caught on the fuel drain spigot and I tore it loose. My mind had long since left, and I was blindly scrambling toward the front of the ship away from the fuel bladder. Whoom! I reached the cross tube up front and stopped. “Goddamn it!” I screamed “Mother fuckers!” Then I realized that the Huey was just thin aluminum and magnesium and Plexiglas and jet fuel, and that if a round hit, I would go up in smoke with it. “Get away from the ship, you stupid shit!” I yelled to myself. I crawled in the foot-deep grass, pressing my nose in the dampness, my nose the runner, my head the sled. Ten feet away I stopped. Whoom! Off to the right. No hard hat. No weapon. I cursed my stupidity and swallowed sobs. Silence! A bug crawled on my cheek. I heard a muffled whoompf and a pop. A flare dazzled and swung in the sky. Whoompf, pop, whoompf, pop. Huey shadows intersected and swayed wildly across the grass. A flare dimmed, then disappeared as it dropped below the ridge. Gray smoke made lazy trails in the light of the flares above. Silence. They stopped? After ten more minutes of lying in the grass, I heard voices. “All over.”

“Jesus H. Christ! How lucky can you get!” I got up. My shoulder hurt where I had hit the drain valve. I believe in God. Really. I walked back to my ship, dropped to my knees, and searched the grass for an already opened can of boned chicken.

The mist was so thick I could barely see the Huey from the tent. The distant mountains from the day before had disappeared. Resler had got up before me, and I could see a friendly orange flicker from his tin-can stove next to our ship. I shivered. It had been a cold and sleepless night.

Nobody had been hurt during the attack. No one could understand why the VC or the NVA or whoever they were had stopped when they did. Certainly it had not been because of any counterattack on our part. They probably just ran out of ammunition. Thank God for VC shortages. We had been sitting ducks.

“Wanna use the stove?” Resler smiled from his hunker. He stirred in sugar from a paper packet. The coffee smelled like life.

“Yeah, thanks.” I leaned in against the edge of the deck and dragged the C-ration case over.

“Let me guess. Scrambled eggs and bacon?”

“Of course. It’s breakfast time, isn’t it?”

“I think you’re the only one in the company who eats that shit.”

“All the more for me.” I got a can from the box and a coffee packet. I poured some water into Resler’s cookie can and set it on his stove. While the flame seared the wetness on the outside of the can, I opened the eggs. Inside was the familiar yellow-green egg loaf with small bits of brownish bacon. I spooned it out cold. Resler made an expression of revulsion as I munched. I spooned another chunk out and held it toward him. “Want some?”

“I don’t eat puke.” He grimaced.

We went through this routine often. It was our morning ritual.

“I’ve never seen fog this thick before.”

“I know.” He checked his watch. “It’s already seven and it looks like five.”

I nodded. The Huey in front of us was a pale shadow, and the one I knew existed in front of it was totally obscured.

“ITO?”

“Probably. When was the last time you did an instrument takeoff?”

“Flight school.”

“Me, too.”

Farris came swirling out of the fog carrying a steaming cup of coffee. “Just talked to an air-force pilot. Says our valley is filled up with this fog, but it’s clear at the peaks.” We nodded. “We’ll wait an hour to see if it burns off.” He continued walking and disappeared behind us.

“Where’d you go last night?” I asked.

“Over there.” Resler pointed toward the GP.

“The tent?”

“No. See that kind of ditch up there?”

“Oh, yeah. Man, if they had kept it up—”

“I know. One of these days, they won’t stop.”

An hour later Farris told us to put our gear inside the ships. He and Riker were going to take off with some other ships, and he wanted us to listen in on the radio. He’d tell us how high up the fog went.

As I followed Resler down the slope, carrying my flight bag, I veered off to the left—nothing very unusual, except that I was trying to walk straight. When I leaned to the right to change course, I kept going to the left. I didn’t feel dizzy, just strange. I stopped for a minute and tried it again. I felt myself being tugged off track again but was able to ignore it. When I reached the ship, the feeling had gone. I shook my head. I’m coming apart.

I strapped in while Resler tuned the channel Farris would be on. We listened while Farris called the ships going with him. He asked if we were on the net.

“Roger,” Gary answered. Six more ships waiting with us rogered in turn.

“There’s no hurry,” Farris radioed. “We’re going back to Kontum to pick up some troops. You guys can meet us anywhere along that valley we followed yesterday. We should be back through in an hour.” We rogered down the line.

While Farris talked, I noticed something in the corner of my eye. Ten feet to the right of our ship, a gray mortar round stuck out of the grass. I punched Gary. He followed my finger and nodded. His eyes rose in surprise.

“I’ll be damned!”

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” said Farris. “The fog ends about five or six hundred feet up. Just make sure you take off due west when you leave. Remember, there’s mountains on both sides of you.”

“Roger,” Gary answered. “Yellow One, there’s a mortar round stuck in the ground next to us.”

“Huh?”

“There’s a mortar round from last night stuck in the ground right next to us.”

“Roger. Call the ARVNs. They might have a demolition squad here.”

I lit a cigarette and stared at the round. It was just about where I had been lying last night.

Gary raised the liaison officer, an American who stayed with the ARVNs. “Roger, we’ll take care of it. Don’t try to move it yourself.”

We both burst out laughing. “Lucky he told us,” I said. “I was almost out the door to defuse it.”

As courage gathered in each of the seven ships, one would announce he was leaving, and we’d hear him flutter up into the mist. Gary and I decided that the round wasn’t going to explode, since it hadn‘t, so we waited. Neither of us felt entirely confident about the ITO. If we had the time, why not wait to see if the fog burned off? The last ship left. They radioed back that the fog was still about five or six hundred feet deep.