Robert Mason - Chickenhawk

We just had a party not too long ago, I said silently to a lumpy body bag. Someone tried to push down a knee that jutted awkwardly. The knee moved down but sprang back up when let go. The smell grew so strong that I gagged. You should have been there, I thought.

On July 17 we were back at our permanent camp at Phan Rang for a four-day rest. Next stop would be Tuy Hoa.

Gary and I had passed our thirty-day-to-go mark on the twelfth. Four replacement pilots had come to the company. We really believed that we would be staying back at the camp to fly admin flights for the battalion or the ARVNs.

“I’m sorry, but it just didn’t work out that way,” said Deacon. “Ringknocker had been to some pre-mission briefings and says we’re going to be very busy at Tuy Hoa. We have to support two units, one being Korean. We’re just going to need every pilot we have.”

I looked at Gary. Gary looked at me. We both looked at Deacon.

“So why has everybody been saying we’d be doing admin flights during our last month?” I said.

“We thought that that’s the way it would be.” Deacon looked unhappy. It was ruining his expectations, too. The “last month” program was fading to the dream that it probably had been all along. “I know that both of you are getting pretty jittery. Just keep doing what you’ve been doing and hang on. You’ll be home before you know it. If it helps, just remember the rest of us have more than six months to go.”

“Well, Deacon, I hope that when you get short, they give you some kind of a break. I’m telling you now that you’ll need one. I do,” I said.

“I know. I’m sorry.” Deacon left the tent.

Now I had to reset my clock. Every sunset had put me one day closer to getting out of here. My mental calendar had ticked off the moments until it believed that it had reached zero. Adding twenty-five more sunsets to the calendar was a real strain.

“Look,” I said to Doc DaVinci, “I’m tired. I can’t sleep at night. I have to take tranquilizers to function. I need a break. Can’t you do something?”

“I’d like to help you, Bob. But physically you’re fine.”

I glared at him. “Look at me. I weigh less than a hundred and twenty pounds. I look like shit!”

“Another three weeks of being skinny won’t hurt you.”

“It’s not that I’m skinny; it’s why I am skinny. I’m worn out. I’m frayed. I want to fly admin flights like hundreds of other pilots do every day.”

“Well, if you tell me you’re afraid to fly, I can ground you.”

“If I tell you I’m afraid to fly, you’ll ground me?”

“Yes.”

Why is he setting me up like this? I thought. Why does he want me to say that I’m afraid? Why can’t he just use his professional authority and put a medical restriction on me?

“I can’t say that. I’m not afraid to fly, I just don’t think I or Gary or any short-timer should have to fly combat assaults anymore. We have each flown more than a thousand missions already. Isn’t that enough? Why couldn’t they bring up a couple of Saigon warriors to take our place? They could use the experience, and Gary and I could finish off our tours flying VIPs around or something.”

“I told you what I have to do.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Well, just don’t take the tranquilizers during the day,” said Da Vinci. That was the end of the conversation.

Gary and I sat at a table watching the Prospectors whoop it up at the party that night. Neither of us could join in. The laughing skull was no longer funny.

We had camped on the beach at Tuy Hoa for one day when a storm struck. Seventy-mile-an-hour winds blew clouds of sand in horizontal sheets. Tents began to collapse. Hueys approaching along the beach had to fly sideways. The only direction their noses could point in was into the wind.

Gary, Stoopy, and I had pitched our tent a quarter of a mile nearer the ocean than the headquarters tent. We got back from a mission in time to see Stoopy wrestling with the flapping canvas. Blankets, mosquito netting, and clothes were rolling across the dunes like tumbleweed.

“Jesus Christ, Stoopy. Why did you let the tent collapse?” yelled Gary.

“This is just like a desert storm you see in the movies.” Stoopy grinned, shoveling sand into what he believed would be a protective berm.

“Shit,” I said, “let’s get this fucker nailed down.”

“The wind keeps pulling the tent pegs out,” said Stoopy.

“So we make dead men,” I shouted in the wind.

“What the hell are you talking about?” yelled Gary. He had wrapped a towel around his neck and head to keep the sand out.

“A dead man is something you tie a rope to and bury,”

I said, blinking. “We can tie the ropes to sandbags and then bury them.”

“All right, let’s do it.” Stoopy’s shout barely rose above the wind.

Stoopy filled sandbags while Gary and I went around the tent tying them to the ropes and burying them. When we finished, the tent was concave on the windward side; it shook, but it held. We ducked inside to try to get the sand off our gear. The salty sand stuck to everything. My carbine gritted when I worked the bolt. I watched Gary slapping his cot with a towel, trying to dust about ten pounds of sand away. Stoopy lay on his cot, on a mixed pile of clothes, blankets, and sand, eating another candy bar.

“Stoopy, why don’t you get that fucking sand off your stuff?” I said.

“It’ll just get sandy again.”

I shook my head in disgust.

“It will. I’ll clean it up before I go to sleep tonight.”

“You’re a slob, Stoopy,” said Gary.

“So?” said Stoopy. “Somebody has to do it.”

Gary and I laughed. Stoopy’s grin showed the chocolate stains on his teeth.

With two weeks to go, I had very little tolerance for a person like Stoopy. But I realized that his intentions were good. He was friendly; he really wanted to be a good pilot; he wanted the Americans to win the war; and he flew into the assaults without showing fear.

The problem was that he was a terrible pilot (“professional copilot,” we called them); he was overweight; he was a slob; he was juvenile; and he was downright dangerous.

At Dak To, he had unloaded a parked flare ship by throwing the flares out the door. Unfortunately, the flare canisters were still attached by lines from their fuses to the deck. Normally this allowed them to ignite automatically as they were pushed out at 2000 or 3000 feet. But since Stoopy was unloading the ship on the ground, he was soon surrounded by a giant cloud of white smoke and blinding magnesium flames. Strangely, he was not hurt. He was also famous among us for not being able to keep himself in his formation slot. In just the few months he’d been with the Prospectors, he’d become known as the “smiling menace.”

Naturally, when battalion requested that Ringknocker send his best pilot to Saigon to work for the VIPs, Ringknocker sent Stoopy. All the pilots had to vote for the best pilot, and he would be sent to Saigon. At the meeting Ringknocker told us the rules: Vote for Stoopy. “We have a terrible shortage of pilots already, so battalion gets what I can afford,” said Ringknocker. “Stoopy Stoddard is what I can afford. You gentlemen will vote for Stoopy and then we can get back to work.”

When I had first dealt with the Koreans at Bong Son valley, I was impressed by their zeal. When we drove by the Korean bridge guards, they jumped to attention with a shout. When we were mortared, the Koreans were the ones who came back to the camp carrying VC heads and the mortar tube. From the first time I saw them, I thought we’d be better off just giving the Koreans the country, if they could take it. They probably would’ve.