Robert Mason - Chickenhawk

I stayed up and smoked cigarettes all night. I tried to sleep, only to jerk awake, sitting in bed, listening.

I was back at Dak To, home, the next day. Here, the war was simple. We did our job well, beat the VC almost every time, and kept them on the run. Here, I was a member of the honorable side. The reluctant, cowardly Vietnamese were not visible to remind me that they didn’t care. I could go on believing that simply by killing more and more Communists we would win. When I crawled into my cot my first night back, I fell instantly asleep.

The next day, Gary and I sat on the deck of our Huey waiting for the grunts to finish eating. Their platoon was one of several that were pushing toward the west, scouting for the VC. We joked in familiar surroundings.

“You shoulda come, you know,” said Gary.

“I tried, asshole. They wouldn’t let me. How did you get a ticket?”

“I just went to the ticket counter and bought it.”

“Well, you must have looked like a civilian, because they wouldn’t sell me anything.”

“It’s really a shame. You missed Grass Mountain.”

“What’s that?”

“Grass Mountain is packed with geisha houses. Wanna know what it’s like to go to a geisha house?”

“No.”

“They start off with a bath. Just you and two naked girls. They wash you first, then soak you, then massage you.”

“Didn’t you hear me?”

“I heard you,” Gary said. “The two of them massage you so well you think you’re going to crack. Then, at the perfect moment, one of the girls sits on you and puts you out of your misery.”

I nodded my head with closed eyes, kicking myself for not getting laid when I had the chance.

“And that’s just the beginning.”

“Just the beginning!”

“That’s right. It takes hours to get out of this place. They give you more baths, and tea and food and massages, to keep you going, and then they pass you down the line to teams of two or three girls who work you over in different ways.” Gary’s face brightened at his memories.

“I never even heard of Grass Mountain when I was there,” I lamented.

“Never heard of it? Where the hell were you?”

The next day I was flying with Sky King. In the middle of a laager, a grunt lieutenant came to our ship. “We just had a newsman wounded. Will you guys pick him up?”

“Sure,” I said.

“The squad leader with the guy said it was a sniper. They say they’ve got the place secured.”

“No problem. Where are they?”

The lieutenant showed me on his map. They were only a mile away. When I turned to get into the ship, Sky King and the crew chief were all ready to go. I strapped in as Sky King cranked up.

Sky King flew at fifty knots heading for the place.

“Over there,” I pointed to four or five soldiers standing around a prone man in a thicket of leafless trees. “You see them?”

“Got ‘em.”

As we flew by, the men hit the dirt, leaving one man standing. He was aiming a movie camera at us.

“Great place for a landing,” said Sky King.

The base of the clearing was wide enough for our ship, but the scrawny branches twenty feet off the ground crowded over the circle, making it too tight to get in.

“Axle One-Six,” I radioed. “Can you move to a better clearing?” Sky King circled, looking for a way to get through the trees.

“Negative, Prospector. We’re still getting sniper fire, and this guy is wounded pretty bad.”

Sky King set up an approach and closed in. As he got to the treetops, it became obvious that he was going to hit branches with the main rotor, so he aborted.

When the squad saw us heading across the LZ, they radioed, “Can you make it, Prospector?”

Sky King shook his head. “I can’t get in there. You want to try it?”

I nodded and took the controls. While Sky King had approached, I thought I saw a way. “We’ll get in, Axle One-Six. Just hang on.”

The plan was simple. I would come in ninety degrees to Sky King’s last try and then turn sharp. I thought that in a bank the rotors could slip through the narrow slot that Sky King had shot for. I lined up on a tangent to the clearing and let down.

I hit the turn fast, banked hard over, and as we slipped toward the ground, I saw that I was going to hit some stuff anyway. The main rotor smashed some dead branches, sounding like machine-gun fire. I flared for the landing and we were down.

“Great. Now how are you going to get out?” said Sky King.

I didn’t answer, because I didn’t know how I was going to get out. The grunts grabbed the wounded man. He was unconscious, his fatigue blouse sopping with his blood. At that point I noticed the cameraman standing back filming the whole thing. The grunts were prone beside him, laying out cover fire toward the jungle. When I saw him aim the camera toward the cockpit, I sat a little straighter, and thought cool thoughts, in case those, too, might somehow be recorded. The crew chief called that we were ready, and the cameraman jumped on board.

In fact, there was no acceptable way to get out. There was not enough room to accelerate and bank back out through the slot. Some of the high branches hung over our rotor disk. By the book, we were trapped.

But I had seen rotor blades stand up to incredible stress before, so I decided to take the brute-force option. I picked up to the hover, turned the tail until it matched a slot in the overhanging branches, and then pulled the pitch. We climbed straight up twenty feet before the rotors smashed into cane-thick branches at nearly every point of their circle. It sounded like the rotors were being smashed to pieces. Seconds later we cleared the treetops and I nosed over, accelerating toward the airstrip five miles away.

“Someday you’re going to hit a branch that’s just a little too big,” Sky King said after a long quiet.

“What then?” I asked.

“Then your ship’s going to come apart, and you’re going to kill yourself and everybody around you.”

“Now that’s frightening,” I said. “I think maybe I oughta quit this job and go home.”

“This guy’s still alive, sir.” The crew chief’s voice buzzed in my headphones. “The cameraman says he’s the president of CBS News. Imagine that.”

“Ain’t that a kick,” Sky King said. “I guess he got bored with his nice safe desk job, the dumb shit.”

When we landed at the hospital tent at the 101st, the cameraman jumped out and filmed his boss being unloaded. He filmed Gary and me in the cockpit, then put the camera down and gave us a salute.

I nodded, brought the rotors up to operating, and leapt off the pad. As I flew back to retrieve the empty thermos containers we left with the grunts, I recalled the cameraman’s salute and felt slightly heroic.

When we shut down that night, Sky King showed me the creases and nicks in the rotors and scolded me. “Look at this. You’ve ruined them.”

“Naw. They’re fine. Just creased is all. No holes. Look at the bright side. The guy’s alive.”

“Yeah, but look at those rotors.”

During the second week of July, Operation Hawthorne began winding up. The patrols and reconnaissance companies were getting very little opposition in the battle zone. The NVA had slipped away.

“If they’re gone, and we killed two thousand of them, we won,” said Gary.

“What did we win? We don’t have any more real estate, no new villages are under American control, and it took everything we had to stop them,” I said.

“We won the battle. More of them got killed than us. It’s that simple.”

“Doesn’t it bother you that it takes so much equipment and men to beat the NVA? If we were equally equipped, we’d lose.”

“Yeah, but we aren’t equally equipped, and they lose. Besides that, I have a month to go and I don’t give a shit.”