Robert Mason - Chickenhawk

Resler nodded agreeably but cautiously. Stoopy had taken the hit early in the day and had had the crew chief give him the ungainly trophy.

“Going to take this thing back home,” said Stoopy.

I was feeling kind of guilty for thinking that Stoopy was a jerk. He was… just a little too exuberant, or something.

“You’re a moron,” said Resler. I laughed for a long while.

“So, this is the deal.” Sky King talked as we sat in the mess tent. “Ice.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Ice, man.” Sky King’s eyes gleamed in the light of the mess tent’s bare bulb. Our generator grumbled and popped in a hole fifty feet away.

“This is the business deal you were talking about?”

“That’s it, kimo sabe. Ringknocker’s agreed. We start taking a ship down to Kontum every day and load it up with ice. You know, big blocks of ice. We bring it back here and sell it to our own mess, the company’s beer tent, and the rest we unload to the grunts at the 101st. We’ll charge the grunts enough to pay for our ice. Nice deal, eh? The Prospectors get free ice.”

“We have an ice machine.”

“We do, but it only makes chipped ice. And just barely enough for drinks. We’re talking about big twenty-five-kilo blocks of ice to cool the beer. Besides, there’ll be a profit, and we can use the money for the club. What do you think?”

“What do you want me to do?” I said.

“Just volunteer to fly down with me every day.”

“Sure. Why not?”

“Exactly. Partner.”

We couldn’t land a Huey in downtown Kontum to get ice. Sky King had arranged for a truck from a nearby Special Forces camp. The deal was that we could use their truck and driver if we let them use our Huey and a pilot.

On the first day of the ice business, Sky King took the truck into town while I flew the Special Forces CO—a lieutenant named Bricklin—on his jungle patrol. We covered his normal route through the scrub and jungle at low level in twenty minutes. The same trip via ankle express took him and his Chinese mercenaries a full day to complete. Naturally, he couldn’t see much from a speeding helicopter, nothing like what he could’ve seen had he walked, but he could honestly report that he had covered the entire route. This made him and his men very happy.

Only fifteen or twenty of the two hundred men at this camp were Americans. The rest were Chinese mercenaries from Saigon. When we landed back at the compound, Bricklin pointed out the arrangement, indicating that that side was for the Chinese, this for the Americans.

Bricklin was a tall and lean Montanan. He—like most of the Special Forces—was of the old school concerning the proper way to handle the war. Charlie was treated somewhat like a band of mischievous outlaws whose chances of actually taking over the country were nonexis tent. Bricklin believed that with the Americans dominating the Kontum area, the people would eventually come to trust the Americans and their ways, especially if the Americans educated their children and supplied medical care and other material goodies that even backward peasants come to crave when they are exposed to them.

Bricklin had begun to point out the advantages of the patient method of converting the Vietnamese versus the so-called war of attrition when he saw the Cav’s horse patch on my right shoulder.

“The only trouble with those guys,” said Bricklin, “is they kill a lotta people that just happened to get in the way. Every time a villager or his water buffalo gets killed, the VC boys talk it up real big. ‘See how much the Americans love you?’ they say. ‘Killed old Mrs. Koa yesterday and she was seventy-five and never hurt a bug.’ Course, old Charlie had come through the same village and executed the honchos, but who trusts politicians anyway? These wide-screen raids the Cav and other units are doing are wrecking everything these people have. Sure, they beat the NVA units and the VC units, but they’re ignoring the stomping they’re doing to the people we’re trying to help. And this relocation thing is about equal to dying as far as the villagers are concerned. These people are born, grow up, and die all in the same village—the village of their ancestors. That village is everything to them. So what do we do? We come marching through, burn it down—to keep the VC from occupying it—and move the people out to God knows where and turn them overnight into refugees and welfare cases and honest-to-God American-haters. The VC are winning because we’re losing.” Bricklin had said all that before he popped a beer inside the small metal building they called their club. “Just show ‘em by example. Show the VC how good the American way is, and they’ll come around. These people’ ll go the way that works.”

Bricklin and I sat at a folding table in the small bar. I drank a cup of coffee while he drank beer. I had to fly.

Everything about the place was easygoing. Even the slot machine was easy. The machine’s covers were off; you could see the gears and wheels and the money box. You could reclaim your losses by reaching into the back. Bricklin’s philosophy got me into a political mood.

“Do you think we ought to be here in the first place?” I asked.

“Well, that’s another question altogether, isn’t it? Fact is, we are here.”

“To me it’s the question.”

“You may be right, but things like this are real hard to stop once they get going. I think we’re going to be here a real long time.”

“Do you think we’ll win?”

“Not if we keep bustin’ up the villages and killing the people we’re trying to save, we won’t.”

“A lot of people say that if we had allowed the Vietnamese to have their elections, they would’ve voted for Ho Chi Minh and there wouldn’t be any war.”

Bricklin nodded. “Yeah, I’ve read that, too. And it’s probably true. But like I say, we’re here now.”

“So why can’t we just pull out?”

“Do you think LBJ would ever walk out on this gunfight?”

“No.”

“You’re right,” Bricklin said, and smiled.

The ice truck rolled through the gate and stopped by the bar. Sky King got out and pushed through the screen door. “Man, the prices around here.” He sat down beside me. “Fuckers charge two-fifty for a fifty-pound block. The same thing costs seventy-five cents at Phan Rang.”

“Well, we had the Cav come through here a month ago,” said Bricklin. “Those guys paid whatever the people asked for—ruined them for bargaining. They just don’t understand the locals.” He winked at me.

Sky King had a beer and talked to Bricklin. He told him that the deal was working fine, and if it was okay by him, we’d be coming down every day.

“Just make yourselves at home,” said Bricklin, “and bring your Huey.”

We walked out to the ship as the last of the blocks were put on board. There was a total of twenty blocks—a thousand pounds of ice—packed wetly on the deck. I cranked up. Because of the extra weight, I couldn’t hover up over the flagpole, so I turned the ship around and took off the way we came in.

As we headed up the valley on the thirty-mile flight back to Dak To, Sky King smoked cigarettes, chattered about the business, and nervously watched the cargo melting in the warm, hundred-mile-an-hour wind.

“Shit, we’ll be lucky to get back with half the ice we bought,” he said. “How ‘bout we close the doors?” he asked the crew chief.

“If we do that, sir, we can’t get to our guns,” said the chief.

“Oh, yeah.” He turned to me. “Next trip we got to bring a tarp to put over that stuff.”

He turned around, watching the cargo. “Shit, look at it go! Each one of those drops is a fucking dime!”