Stephen Wright - Meditations in Green

Griffin looked up and saw himself, a pair of distorted heads in the convex silver lenses of Lieutenant Mueller’s sunglasses. “You look like an insect,” he said, adjusting the wet washcloth across his forehead.

“I feel like an overdone vegetable. Listen, you want some relief?”

“Of course, but I don’t think Sergeant Ramirez will allow me to sleep in the refrigerator.”

“Jellyroll’s got the shits again. You want a ride?”

“What are the targets?”

“Bac Nham, the Monkey’s Tit, 1033, 906, Chu Dan, that squiggly little stream looks like a line of worm crap, the usual.”

“That’s nice. Watch out for the AA on 906.”

“It’s cool.”

“Cool?”

“You’ll need a jacket.”

“Cool?”

Cinched into a flight harness, Griffin felt like an astronaut except for the .38 revolver strapped in a holster around his waist. No commies on the moon—yet.

“You know,” Mueller had joked, handing him the weapon, “in case of an ‘incident.’”

Inside the Mohawk cockpit, Griffin sat helpless as a baby in a high chair as Mueller leaned over, attaching the numerous buckled straps to all the proper metal loops. He reached between Griffin’s legs and clicked a red switch. “Your seat is now armed,” he announced, smiling pleasantly. Griffin began to wonder just how disagreeable the weather actually was. “Look in the rearview mirror,” Mueller directed. “See that basketball hoop above your head? To eject just reach up and yank, hard. You’ll know when it’s time because you’ll look over and I won’t be here anywhere.”

“Having a good time?”

“Put on your helmet. From now on if you want to talk press this button here.” Mueller strapped on his helmet, adjusted the mike so that its stubby gray rectangle grazed his lips. “How do you read me?” he said in a fuzzy metallic voice.

“Reading you five by,” answered Griffin. This might be fun.

“Let’s crank up this bird and get out of here.” With the hatches locked both of them had begun to perspire heavily.

Mueller started the engines. The cockpit shuddered, then settled into a steady not uncomfortable vibration. Staring out his window, Griffin was cheered by the words ROLLS-ROYCE in shiny chrome insignia fixed to the engine housing, but once the plane heaved itself forward and began to move, a stiff old-fashioned buggy trundling over the metal flight ramp, wings bouncing awkwardly up and down, he wondered who had constructed the fuselage—American Flyer? At the end of the runway the Mohawk turned and came to a halt. Griffin looked down a diminishing length of rubber-streaked pavement. A dirty white passenger prop rumbled in over them, tires squealing and smoking down that pavement. As the plane taxied toward the terminal Griffin saw the lettering AIR VIETNAM and, pressed against each oval window, an anxious Oriental face. Tourists in for the season? The static in both ears synthesized into the words “Looking Glass zero eight something something” and the engines began to scream. Griffin clutched the map boards in his lap. The plane was bouncing again as though some delinquents were outside rocking the tail, the black strip of runway moved toward him, rolling up on a reel beneath the nose; the hangars, the supply sheds, the offices on either side of them were moving too, scenery attached to the same reel as the runway blurring now, and the plane, moments before a frail toy, took on sensations of hardness, strength, and stability. Griffin glanced out his window and realized they were up. The Mohawk dipped, circled once over the airfield, giving Griffin his first aerial view of the base. Arranged in such precise straight lines and right angles, the 1069th resembled a concentration camp or a movie lot, the Quonset huts housing sound studios. The plane climbed, pushing through foggy wisps of cloud, and headed west, out toward Indian Country. Air streamed in across Griffin’s face, strong and cool. Griffin, his focus consistently limited to the blemishes recorded on film, hadn’t ever experienced the simple beauty of the land. There was a lushness of organic color he had never seen before. Fifty-seven varieties of green and off in the distance a row of emerald mountains supporting a balcony of blazing clouds. A natural greenhouse. Toss a seed from this altitude and it would sprout before it touched dirt. The plane flew over rice paddies, a patchwork quilt divided by dikes and flooded now so that the ground seemed like an immense latticed mirror over whose unchanging surface moved a small bright airplane chased by a somewhat larger and darker shadow. Griffin imagined a stick of bombs shattering the polished glass. How many years bad luck? Far off in the distance, hanging in the sky like a string of lights, were the sunstruck windscreens of hovering helicopters. Then, as though it were suspended on a wire between Griffin and the ground, a single engined Cessna floated by at a ninety-degree angle to the Mohawk.

“Forward Air Controller,” explained Mueller. “Wanna hang around and watch?”

“Show me the war,” replied Griffin. He wondered if the Cessna might not be one of the very Bird Dogs serviced by that gang of horny privates who had given him a lift to the PX one long ago day.

Higher up in the sky, between Griffin and the sun, a flight of F-4s came streaking in, bodies camouflaged in splotches of brown and green paint, wings and tails cut to resemble shark fins. Griffin’s ears filled with cool professional voices so near their owners might have been jammed into this cockpit with him.

“Good morning, Spud, how are you?”

“Looking good, Bluebird, what size eggs you got to lay for me today?”

“Five hundred pounders, four rocket tubes, some twenty mike mike, all that good shit.”

“Make me happy.”

“There’s heavy fire coming from the tree line. The village has got a damn stone wall around it. I count about a dozen structures, same-same bunkers, spider holes, looks like a tunnel system all through it, I think they’re probably stuck in there pretty tight.”

“Need some loosening, huh?”

“The province chief says the whole place is lousy with VC so knock yourselves out. Didn’t bother with the phosphorus. Figure you can line it up on the road and work your way in along that axis.”

“Affirm.”

One by one the F-4s peeled off and came swooping down in over the tree line. Griffin could see shock waves along the ground as clear as the rings in a pond of water when a rock is tossed in. Columns of smoke lifted into the blue sky.

“Oh boy!” shouted someone in Griffin’s ear. “Oh fucking boy!”

The separate columns of smoke joined together in one solid wall rising high and thick from the combustion below. Palm trees swayed in the fire, turned black and shrank. The burning hootches became visible, collapsing in slow motion into the flames. There was no sign of life anywhere on the ground.

“Shit hot, Bluebird, that’s a one-oh-oh. Six structures, at least twenty KBAs. Thank you very much.”

“Thank you, Spud. Glad to be of service.”

“Hold one, Bluebird. There’s a definite unfriendly scooting out the back door. Can someone handle that?”

“Roger.”

Griffin could see a speck moving along a brown road.

One of the jets knifed swiftly downward, swept in over the road. Its black nose twinkled. A dust cloud rose up. The speck stopped moving.

“Right on. Thank you, Bluebird, it’s been a pleasure working with you.”

“Any time, Spud.”

The F-4s soared into the haze.

“Wonderful,” said Griffin.

“See all the fun you office boys miss out on,” said Mueller.

Their plane climbed a spur of jagged mountains and entered a valley of the moon, barren earth pounded into dust and pocked with craters more numerous than skin pores, a bowl of holes, depressions in an ashtray.