Роберт Мейсон: Chickenhawk: Back in the World - Life After Vietnam

Deer turns. I block.

Deer stops for second, stares at the clamorous, hideous thing chasing it; stumbles backward, spins around to make an escape. No good. I’m there, too.

Deer sags, legs spread out. Chest heaves. Tongue hangs out from exhaustion. I back away, inviting it to run again.

C’mon, run! You asshole!

Deer stares, eyes glazed, immobile.

I have beaten this deer.

I’d been at Wolters for over a year. Coming into the main heliport with my last student of the day, I took the controls after the student came to a hover at the landing pad, because of the traffic. Hundreds of helicopters hovering to their parking spots made hundreds of rotor-wash storms, so the helicopters were tricky to control. The machine wanted to skitter off with every gust. My hands and feet moved the controls automatically, compensating. The Hiller hovered between spinning rotors, jittery, like a thoroughbred being led through a crowd.

Almost to the parking slot, I feel the helicopter tilt backward and immediately push the cyclic forward. Wrong. Not tilting back. I can see that, but it still feels like we’re tilting back. I force myself to concentrate, ignore the feeling, fly reality. But the feeling is unshakable. Which is real? Bad time to experiment with relativity, so I tell the student “You got it” as I hover into the parking spot. Student says, “I got it.” Good student. Figures asshole IP is fucking with him again; probably wondering if IP will cut the power while he tries to park. Student sets the Hiller down like a pro.

Drive to the flight surgeon after leaving the student (he got an excellent grade), still dizzy. Flight surgeon impressed. No flying. They decided to watch me for a month to see if I got dizzy again. The flight commander put me in charge of our pickup truck. I drove it out to the stage fields and helped in the control towers, keeping track of the ships as they checked in, made coffee. Gofer work. I felt horrible. No flying? That’s why I joined the Army. I went to the flight surgeon. Told him I felt great, sleeping like a fucking log. He believed me. I was back in the air two weeks after I was grounded.

Two months later it happened again. This time I was cruising straight and level, felt the ship rolling when it was not. My student landed, never knowing his IP was fucked up. This time I was grounded until they could find out what was wrong.

What is wrong? shrink asks. Dunno. Have a real hard time sleeping. Don’t sleep.

“Do you have dreams?”

“Patience asks if I’m dreaming when I jump up all night. I dream, but I can’t remember them—except one. But I’m never able to tell her this dream. I tell her I don’t dream anything.”

“What’s it about?” shrink asks.

“I’m not sure where I am, but every morning a truck comes—”

“What truck?”

“A truck loaded with dead babies.”

“You’ve seen this—in Vietnam?”

“No. I’ve seen lots of dead babies, but not loaded in trucks.”

“Continue, please.”

“The truck comes. I have to open the back door; I know what’s out there, but I still go to the door. It’s always the same. The driver backs the truck to the door and says, ‘How many do you want?’ He points to the pile of dead babies. I always gag at the sight. They all look dead, but then I see an eyelid blink in the pile, then another.”

“That’s it?”

Feeling bad; seeing it. “No. I always answer, Two hundred pounds, Jake.’ I laugh when I say it. Jake picks up a pitchfork and stabs it into the pile and drops a couple of corpses on a big scale. ‘Nearly ten pounds a head,’ he says. Inside my head, I’m yelling for him to stop, that the babies aren’t dead, but Jake just keeps loading the scale. Each time he stabs a kid, it squirms on the fork, but Jake doesn’t notice.”

Shrink watches me awhile. “That’s the end?”

“Yes.”

“What do you think the dream means?”

“I was hoping you’d tell me.”

“I’m more interested in what you think it means.”

“I don’t know.”

The shrink sent me to Fort Sam Houston for loony tests. Fort Sam is a big medical post and the Army’s burn treatment center. In a hallway I saw many Vietnam veterans, kids with their faces burned off. New pink skin grafts were stretched over stunted noses. The public never saw this—bad for the war effort. I felt terrible; I was whole. Why was I here?

Diagnosis: combat neurosis. They prescribed Valium, so I could not fly. My new medical profile said: Aviator may not be assigned to duty in combat area. They were shipping pilots back to Vietnam every day. My new profile was known as the “million-dollar ticket” at Wolters, but I wanted to fly. Without flying, the Army was a drag.

They found out I wrote stories. I told them, yes, I had many rejection slips to prove it. They assigned me to MOI as a platform instructor. I helped write the syllabus and gave lectures about being an IP. I worked with a captain, Robert Giraudo. Just the two of us ran the whole IP ground-school training sessions and had fun doing it. Giraudo eventually made major but turned in his resignation. He said the Army was getting old. Giraudo was okay.

A year later, when they asked me if I was staying (I was getting near the end of my three-year obligation) I said no. The head of the MOI branch thought I was good in MOI and offered me a direct commission as a real officer, a regular Army captain, if I stayed. No.

Out-process. Debrief. Gone. Leave in Volvo packed to brim. Go toward Fort Worth like a Saturday trip, but won’t come back for twenty years. See helicopters flying over a butte; blink a lot.

When I’d dropped out of the University of Florida in 1962,1 had a grade point average of 1.2. To be readmitted and to resume my major in fine arts, I had to be sponsored by the chairman of the art department, Eugene Grissom. Grissom saw little point in my continuing—who would?—but agreed to sponsor me if I maintained a 3.0 average.

In June 1968 I was once again a college sophomore. I was seven years older than most sophomores. I was married and had a son. I was a veteran of a war still being waged. We moved into a married student apartment on campus at Schucht Village in Gainesville. I’d gotten a lot of D’s and had to take several of my undergraduate classes over—mathematics, history, and English.

When I stood in line at registration, I couldn’t believe what silly-simple shit civilians worried about. These people pissed and moaned if they couldn’t get a morning class, or if Friday afternoon got busy, or if some crip-course was filled. I had seen grunts infested with intestinal worms, living in swamps, eating crap, dying young, their brains splattered in the mud, their intestines spilled into their laps. Hey! You think this is a problem?

Every evening, sipping bourbon, I watched the news. Usually they showed a five-minute Vietnam segment: firefight, lots of smoke; wounded grunts, battered and bloody, being loaded onto a Huey.

Looked like my Huey. That film was shot the day before. They were still there, still dying for no good reason, and nobody cared. Die, and get ten seconds on national television; wounded, less.

A machine gun crackled on television.

My gunner is shooting, walking the bullets across the rice paddy to a crowd of people concealing a Viet Cong gunner who’s been knocking helicopters out of the sky. I tell him to walk the bullets—give the villagers a chance to run. He does, but they don’t run. I see them close-up as the bullets hit. The old woman with black teeth says something to me, then screams. There is no sound. Her wrinkled hand holds a child’s smooth arm. The child hangs lifeless and drags the old woman down. She moves slowly, like she is falling through water. The people around her gasp silently and flinch and fall. The machine gun stutters from a distant place. They fall slowly to the ground, bounce, dying and dead. The old woman is saying something, but I can’t hear. When I see her lips moving, I realize she is saying, “It’s okay….”