Robert Mason - Chickenhawk

“Flatbush. That’s in Brooklyn,” he said.

“So, we just wait until the ship is ready and then fly out?”

“That’s it. Maintenance told me it should be ready tomorrow morning.”

We watched a flight of four Phantoms take off. When they hit their afterburners on the climb-out, it was like thunder. “Looks like fun.” I said.

“It is,” said Staglioni. “I tried it once.”

“You flew a Phantom?”

“Yeah. You could, too, if you wanted. They come over here all the time. They like to trade flight time.”

“They want to fly Hueys?”

“Yeah. They’re all the time betting that they can hover a chopper first time up.”

“I bet they can’t.”

“You’re right. None of them have so far. One of their pilots even flew a mission with us one day. He hated it. He felt like we were too close to everything, you know, right down in it. They really don’t see much on their strikes. They aim at puffs of smoke in the jungle, drop their shit, and bam, they’re back home. Their total time in the air from takeoff to landing is one hour and twenty minutes. It’s a quickie. Then they hop in an air-conditioned van and cruise back to the club. And that’s it for the day. A hundred missions and they go home.” He paused for a minute while a Phantom came in for a landing. “Can you imagine? A hundred missions? Shit, I’d be back home twice already.”

“You guys log missions?”

“No, not officially. I keep my own log. The last time I told one of the air-force guys how many missions I’d flown, he said, ‘What do you expect? The smart pilots are in the air force.’ That fucker.”

I watched another Phantom take off. If I had stayed in college, I lamented, I would be flying those and living on the other side of the runway.

“It’s true,” I said.

“What is?”

“The smart pilots are in the air force.”

The camp was a dirty-fabric ghost town. The trail that led from the club past the row of ten GPs was completely deserted. Staglioni went to his tent and I went to mine.

I wrote Patience a letter to bring her up to date and give her my new address.

A Vietnamese woman dressed in black pajamas ducked in through the tent flaps. She nodded as she walked by. She walked to the other end of the tent and began to sweep the dirt floor with a bamboo whisk broom, drawing neat parallel lines in the dust. When she got to me she bowed slightly and then waited expectantly for me to raise my feet off the plywood platform. I raised my feet and she swept under them. Then she began making up the beds. There were four in the GP. When she got to me again, she bowed. Her smile was black from betel nut, and she waited for me to get up. I jumped up.

“Oh,” I said.

“Ah,” she said. She stripped the whole cot, remade it, and carefully rearranged my gear. Folded flak vest here, .45 and its holster on top there, just so. She stood back and shared with me her artistic arrangement and nodded that I could place my ass back on the blanket.

“Thank you,” I said.

She grinned betel black and ducked outside.

So, even if the army had drawn the dreary side of the field and the dreary domiciles, Ringknocker had gone to some lengths, allowing some luxuries to brighten the dreariness. I hadn’t seen anything yet.

I walked back and forth in the tent for a while. I ducked outside to watch a Phantom take off and nodded to a passing hooch maid. I wanted to go talk to Staglioni, but he had said he was in the middle of a good book. I remembered mine. I was in the middle of the second volume of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Gollum was slithering down cliffs head first as he followed Bilbo. I identified with Gollum and loved his voice. “Yesss,” he said. I tried talking that way back in the Cav: “Yesss, we likes to go on missionssss.” But people thought I was developing a lisp. No one knew who Gollum was. The most popular books were James Bond adventures.

While I read, something went wrong with my brain. Something had to be wrong, because instead of lying back with the book on my lap, the book was on the dirt floor and I was reaching for my .45 and saying, “What?”

“What?” I roamed the tent, looking in corners. I looked outside.

“What?” Something was very wrong. I was tense. I was ready. I waited.

A dark head pushed through the flaps. That? As I drew my pistol, I saw it was Staglioni. “Chow,” he said, and ducked back outside. He had not seen my gun. Abruptly the feeling of impending doom passed. A danger was past. What the danger had been I didn’t know, but it was gone. I holstered the .45 and walked to the mess hall.

I sat at a table with Staglioni and two air-force pilots from across the base. All during the meal I kept worrying about what I had just done. There wasn’t anything wrong. It’s me. I’m going crazy.

“Wanna try it?” The air-force lieutenant asked.

“Try what?”

“Fly a Phantom.”

“I fly slicks.”

“I know. You wanna trade a ride?” He looked at me quizzically.

“No.”

The Huey was not ready the next day. Or the next. Each day I waited, the routine was much the same. Breakfast, read, lunch, read, dinner, read, sleep. The routine was punctuated by moments of nonspecific terror. I spent my nights hopping up out of bed looking for the source of my fears. One afternoon, while I read at a table in the club, I blacked out. One moment I was reading normally; the next thing I knew my face was resting on the pages. That scared me into taking my tortured soul over to the flight surgeon on the air-force side of the base.

“I have these dizzy spells, I keep waking up at night thinking that I’m dying, and yesterday my face fell into my book,” I shamefully admitted.

“Take off your clothes,” said the doctor, with sympathetic fascination.

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“I’m going to give you a neurological examination.”

And he did. He poked me with pins, scraped my soles, tapped my elbows and knees. He had me follow fingers and lights with my eyes, stand on one foot, and touch my fingertips with my eyes closed. And when he finally looked into my eyes with his ophthalmoscope, he said,

“Hmmm.”

“Find something?” I asked.

“Nope. Nothing at all. All your circuits check out fine.”

“So why am I having these blank spells and dizziness?”

“I don’t know.”

I sagged with dissappointment.

“It could be a couple of things,” he added hastily. “You might have a rare form of epilepsy, which I doubt. Or you’re suffering from stress. I would think that with the kind of job you have, it’s stress. But I suggest you check with your own flight surgeon when you get to see him. If you keep having the symptoms, they’ll probably ground you.”

Four days after I had arrived, a week after leaving the Cav, I joined my new unit in the field at Nhon Co.

The Prospectors’ ships were parked in a narrow airstrip cut into the jungle by the French. The camp was up on a hill next to the strip. I carried my gear up and found Deacon, and he showed me to one of the twenty six-sided tents scattered around the sandy, weedy dunes at the top of the hill. My tentmates were two warrants, Monk and Stoopy Stoddard.

“Hey, a new guy,” said Monk. He looked up from filing magazine clippings in a shoebox. He had square jaws and a compact, sturdy body. “But”—he squinted in the glare of the light behind me—“I’d say you’re not new to Nam.” He was looking at my belt buckle. The green tape that covered it was filthy and almost black, the mark of the veteran.

“That’s right. I’m a transfer from the Cav.”

“Really?” said Stoddard. “The Cav? That’s a tough outfit.” Stoopy was an overweight child of a man who said irritating things like “Gosh” and “Wow!” and even