Robert Mason - Chickenhawk

“Not me. Every time I try to examine them, they get pissed off.” He blew a kiss to the girl.

“No you!” she said, shaking her finger. Doc laughed loudly.

She left with someone and two more came inside.

I had forgotten about the songwriters. They were still in their corner rehearsing their latest lyrics, apparently undisturbed by the intrusion of the lovelies.

I left the party at one o‘clock. The girls had been sent back out through the gates in the blaring ambulance, but the Prospectors partied on.

“Okay. We’re taking two ships. Deacon, you pick a crew. I’ll fly the other with Daring.” Ringknocker held a briefing at a table in the mess hall the next morning. Deacon and Daring nodded. I watched from the next table while I ate fresh scrambled eggs. “The target is the Repair and Utility compound, here.” Ringknocker pointed to his frayed map. The R&U compound was a fenced-in field at another air-force base, heavily guarded, surrounded by all sorts of security, where the civilian contractors stored their mountains of building supplies. Such things as tin roofing, lumber, air conditioners, refrigerators, sinks, toilets—everything needed to build a truly American base. “Now I’m trying for an ice maker, but anything will do,” Ringknocker explained. “Deacon, I want you to fly cover while I go down. Keep me posted when the guards start moving our way.” Deacon nodded. “Okay, let’s go.” The group of men got up and left, dressed for a mission.

Ringknocker’s Huey came back an hour later carrying a huge wooden crate on a sling. He landed it on the back of his deuce-and-a-half, which drove it immediately to the maintenance area. When they opened the crate, they discovered that it contained another refrigerator, just like the one they already had. Ringknocker was happy anyway, and by late the next day he had arranged to trade the refrigerator to an air-force unit on the other side of the base for a brand-new ice-making machine. For the next two months, wherever we went in the field, someone got the job of moving the five-hundred-pound ice machine as part of our field gear.

On the afternoon of the fourth day of the break, Deacon told me to take a ship up to our headquarters and pick up two new pilots.

I flew with Sky King, who chattered during the entire thirty-minute flight. He was a happy man and very lik able. His total disregard for army formalities made me forget that he was a captain.

We landed at the sandy pad at headquarters, shut down, and walked to the tent with the mail courier. From a hundred yards away I thought I recognized one of two men carrying flight bags on their shoulders.

“Those must be the two pilots,” said Sky King.

I nodded, staring at the distant, frail figure who sagged under the weight of a giant flight bag. I knew that walk.

“Shit!” I said with a wide grin on my face. “How far do I have to go to get away from you?” The two men were twenty feet away.

“Damn! They told me there wasn’t a chance you’d be in this unit,” Resler replied. I helped him carry his bag back to the ship.

June 1966

It struck me as ironic that the Prospectors, located two hundred miles south of the Cav, were assigned to Dak To, the Cav’s last hunting ground. Within a month of my transfer, I found myself once again scouring for VC in an area in which the Cav had drawn a blank. This time, I flew with a different unit in support of the famous 101st Airborne in Operation Hawthorne. The VC had chosen not to fight the Cav, but apparently they thought they’d try their luck against the 101st.

Our camp was west of the village of Dak To, in a grassy plain south of some low foothills. Our tents were set up in three straight lines, paralleling the red-dirt airstrip. A mile from our camp, the 101st bivouacked and maintained security for themselves and for the Prospectors.

We spent a day filling sandbags to build low walls around our tents. On the morning of the second day, it was announced that we would fly a little mission for some ARVNs before we started direct support of the 101st.

“The best thing that could happen to you is to get a minor bone wound,” said Wolfe. He stood in the awning of the tent I shared with Resler and Stoddard.

“A bone wound? I feel weak just thinking about it,” I said.

“I’m saying that if you had to get wounded, that’s the one to get. A bone wound will get you out of this fucking country.”

Deacon walked down the row between the tents. “Let’s go,” he yelled.

“How about no wounds?” I said. “Maybe they’ll just call the whole thing off.” I reached for my helmet. My .45 was already strapped on over my flak vest. I was ready.

“Fat fucking chance,” said Wolfe.

“Good luck.” Gary ducked out of the tent to go to his ship. He and I couldn’t fly together in the Prospectors, because they didn’t let junior warrants do that. We felt safer together. Especially since the pilot who replaced me back in the Cav, Ron Fox, had been killed sitting in the cockpit with Gary. He had taken a round up through his chin. Gary said that his brains poured out when they removed his helmet. Fox’s death was one of the reasons they had sent Gary on a R&R on the way to the Prospectors. We’d both been working on Deacon to let us fly together—told him what a great team we’d made in the Cav—but so far, no dice.

“Good luck,” I said. I left the tent walking a little way with Wolfe. “What do you get for a scratch?” I said.

“A free cup of coffee. What do you think? You got to get something that takes time to heal but won’t be a permanent handicap.”

“Yeah, I see. I’ll work on it.” I saw Sky King waiting for me by the Operations tent. “See you after the mission. Good luck.”

“Right.” Wolfe gave me a salute.

Sky King smiled. “Hey, this is my lucky day. I get to fly with a veteran. I feel so… secure.”

“Yeah, yeah. Spare me, please.”

“No, really. Just being in the same ship with you makes me feel like everything’s going to be okay.” We walked toward our ship, one pair of pilots in a long, straggling line of helicopter crews walking over the red dirt to their ships.

“You know, you can be a pain in the ass, sir.”

“Haw!” Sky King yelped. “Got you.” We walked up to our ship. “You know, Mason, I like you. And to prove it, I’m going to let you in on a little business deal. I’ll tell you all about it when we get back.”

“Thanks.”

“No, really. You’ll love it. You’ll see.”

One thing different about the Prospectors, aside from such informal relations between officers and warrants, was that they had chest protectors up to their eyeballs. They had so many, in fact, that they kept the extras up in the chin bubbles. Seeing one of them at my feet made me feel guilty. For the lack of one of these, Morris had died. Maybe there was another pilot somewhere in Vietnam, right now, who was wondering why the fuck he didn’t have one. Maybe one was dying right now.

“How did you get so many of these things?” I pointed to the armor.

“We’ve always had them,” said Sky King. He looked at me like I had asked a dumb question. “Why?”

“Just wondered.”

The weather was great, puffy white clouds in a brilliant blue sky, a nice day for flying. Since I had been here once before, I knew that there were no VC around. I felt that I had retired from heavy action after leaving the Cav. My only concern was the ARVNs. I kept hearing such bad stories about them. A Prospector told me that an ARVN had turned and fired at his ship when he dropped them at an LZ. I’d heard that before.