Robert Mason - Chickenhawk

“Neat.”

I nodded and said, “Can I put my gear over here?” I pointed to the back of the tent.

“Sure,” said Stoddard. I threw my bag against the cloth wall and sat on it. Monk resumed filing his clippings. Ragged copies of Stars and Stripes, Newsweek, Time, and other magazines lay strewn in the dirt around his bedroll. He carefully cut each item with a Swiss army scissors, then flipped through alphabetized index cards to find its proper place.

“Are you a writer?” I asked.

“Monk, a writer?” Stoopy giggled. His belly and fat cheeks shook. I noticed chocolate stains on his lips and then saw the chocolate bar grasped in a grubby hand. “He thinks you’re a writer, Monk.” He laughed brightly. Monk shot him a glance that killed the laughter immediately. Stoopy blinked hard and sat quietly and respectfully.

“No, not yet,” said Monk. “I’m just collecting my material. Someday…” he trailed off, apparently avoiding a touchy subject.

“That’s an impressive amount of stuff you got there.” I nodded at the shoebox.

“Thanks, I’ve got more.” He pointed to four more rubber-banded boxes resting against the tent wall. “Someday… You’d be surprised to know what they’re saying about this war.” He nodded slowly and knowingly. I signaled agreement.

“Well, well, well. Look who’s here,” said a voice from the flap.

“Wolfe!”

“Wow, Mason, what a memory!” We both laughed. Wolfe was a former classmate.

“I didn’t know you were with the Prospectors,” I said.

“I was one of the shmucks that set up this camp. I was out here when you arrived.”

“Well, you picked a nice place.”

“Thanks.”

Monk seemed irritated by Wolfe’s intrusion. He rolled a rubber band off his wrist around the shoebox and stashed it carefully with the others. Then he stood up and squeezed past Wolfe without saying a word. Wolfe ignored him as he left. Apparently they were not friendly.

Wolfe and I talked awhile. He had arrived in-country a month before. He was very impressed that I was a short-timer with only two months to go in my tour. I told him I had been in the Cav and that I had recently talked to some classmates of ours up near Kontum. We shared rumors concerning the whereabouts of the rest of the class and agreed that probably most of them were somewhere in Nam. Somebody called that it was chow time, and Stoopy, whom we had completely ignored, leapt outside. As we emerged from the tent, we saw Monk balanced on his hands, walking up a small sand dune.

“That’s pretty good,” I said as we walked away.

“The guy’s a jerk,” said Wolfe sourly.

That evening I delivered a letter from the air-force doctor to Doc Da Vinci, our flight surgeon. He agreed that it was probably just a stress reaction and gave me some tranquilizers to take. He warned me to use them only at night. I couldn’t fly with them. I slept well that night.

The next morning I was back in the saddle in a Huey. The aircraft commander was my platoon leader, Deacon. We flew three missions of local ass-and-trash, single-ship stuff. Deacon let me do all the flying. In four hours that morning, I landed in a clearing so small I had to hover vertically down, also landed on a tight pinnacle, carried two loads that were so heavy I had to make running takeoffs, and finally joined up with three other ships in a formation flight back to the airstrip. I had been thoroughly checked out.

“Damn good flying,” Deacon said from the left seat as I landed behind another Huey back at the airstrip.

“Thanks,” I replied. Coming from an IP, that was a real compliment.

“If you fly that good again tomorrow, I’ll sign you off as an aircraft commander.”

The next day was also the Prospectors’ last day at Nhon Co. So at the end of another day of local ass-and-trash, we flew directly back to Phan Rang. Other ships brought the tents and gear back. I did fly well, and, true to his word, Deacon signed me off as a qualified aircraft commander. On the walk to the company area, Deacon told me that Ringknocker was arranging another big party.

“We seldom get a break like this; we’ll be here four days. Ringknocker likes to see the men enjoy themselves. I’d roll my bedroll up if I were you,” Deacon said.

“Roll up my bedroll?”

“Yeah. Just roll your mattress up and tie it.”

“Why?”

“You’ll see.”

It was nine o‘clock and the party was in full swing. Doc DaVinci sat next to me at the bar and explained how he had prepared the skull that now sang on the wall. He was drunk. The members of the songwriting team sat facing each other in a circle of chairs in a far corner, producing sounds that clashed with a Joan Baez tape. They were drunk. Sky King and Red Blakely Indian-wrestled in the middle of the floor. Sky King held a brimming mug of beer, claiming that he would not spill a drop while he dispatched Red.

“I boiled it,” said DaVinci.

“In the kitchen?” I asked, interested.

“No, no. They wouldn’t let me do it in the kitchen. I built a fire out back and boiled it there. Boiled it a whole day.”

I glanced at the skull, clacking with Baez’s words, admiring the clean gleaming white of it. “It’s so… white.”

“Not naturally. I bleached it after I pulled off the meat.”

I drank some bourbon and nodded. “Of course.” I put my drink down. “Bleach.”

“It’s a fact,” DaVinci said. “Clorox will give your skull a whiter, brighter look.”

“They’re coming!” Sky King yelled. Everyone stopped talking. I could hear a siren wailing in the distance.

“You rolled your bed up?” Deacon had walked up to me.

“Yeah…”

“Smart boy,” he said.

“Who’s coming?” I asked Doc.

“The ladies, of course.”

The siren got louder, then stopped. Somebody outside said, “Back ‘er up.” In the light that shone through the windows I could see the rear end of an army ambulance moving toward the open door. It stopped and someone opened the back. Packed inside were at least a dozen smiling Vietnamese women. All the Prospectors were standing, applauding, whistling, while the ladies were helped out of the ambulance.

It’s hard to say what happened next except that once the women were all inside the club, they began to disappear. Men grabbed giggling girls and ran out the doors into the night. It all happened in minutes. I sat there on the bar stool, open-mouthed. I had just seen an ambulance back up, unload a bunch of whores, and they were carried away?

“There must be some kind of rule against that,” I said.

“Hey, it’s our ambulance,” Doc said.

“If that happened in the Cav, everyone here would be up for a court-martial.” I shook my head in disbelief.

“It works great,” said Doc.“The security guards never stop an ambulance. Best damn thing we ever traded for.”

“You traded for an ambulance?”

“Yeah. Ringknocker got an ambulance, a deuce-and-a-half, and a Jeep for one Huey.”

“A Huey?” I shook my head.

“Yeah, a Huey. It was one of ours that got shot to shit. It was declared a total loss, and its number was taken off the registers. It was just wreckage when Ringknocker made the trade. Part of the deal was that our maintenance guys would piece it back together. It looks like shit, but it flies.”

“That’s incredible.”

“I know. Ringknocker has got a creative mind.”

It had been only fifteen minutes since the girls were carried off when one of them walked back into the club escorted by her partner. “Next,” he called out.

Doc slapped my shoulder and nodded toward the girl. “It’ll change your luck.” He grinned.

“No thanks. I’m still fighting a case of clap,” I said. Inside, I was awed by their style—these Prospectors were out of a dream. “You go ahead.”