Who Shot the Water Buffalo?

by Ken Babbs

  “What about you?’ Ben-San shoots back at him.

  “Me?” Cochran asks. “I’m not considering marriage.”

  “I never told anyone this,” Rob Jacobs says, “but when we first got here I had a rash on my pecker. I powdered it, aired it out, scrubbed it with dial soap every night in the showers, kept after it, and now I’ve got it licked. Hasn’t come back for three weeks.”

  “Incredible,” Cochran says. “There’s a lot of space between my dong and my feet, but I’ll give your treatment a try.” He grabs a can of foot powder off the floor and pours it down the front of his flight suit.

  “I’ve got a confession of my own,” he says, rubbing his crotch. “Doris Day climbed into bed with me last night.”

  “Doris Day,” Ben-San says. “I thought she was a professional virgin.”

  “Not last night she wasn’t. Blowee, all over the sheet and my skivvies. It was a mess, but well worth it.”

  The pilots cheer and begin singing:

  Rooty toot toot, rooty toot toot.

  We’re the boys from the institute.

  We don’t drink and we don’t screw.

  And we don’t go with girls who do.

  Nor fuck, nor fuck, nor fuck you!

  Everyone’s on their feet, stomping on the wood floor.

  “Short arm inspection!”

  “Whip ’em out!”

  “Skin ’em back!”

  “Clean ’em off!”

  “Smegma smegma, raw raw raw,” everyone yells, followed by a mass explosion of joke sneezes and fake laughs morphing into tongue thrashings of idiotic phraseology.

  The Hammer enters the ready room tent, followed by the X.O., Major Lurnt.

  “Attenhut!” Captain Beamus orders.

  We snap to attention. The Hammer gives us a curious look.

  “As you were, men.”

  He takes his place at the head of the tent, looks us over, and begins.

  “Gentlemen, end of the month action reports are in and they indicate the Army helicopter squadron flying those ancient H-21 Flying Bananas have logged more sorties than us. I don’t know if they are counting two minute check flights and on-ramp run-ups as sorties or not, but this is an unacceptable situation. The Army will not, cannot, log more sorties than us.”

  He pauses and lets it sink in. We sit, waiting expectantly, pencils poised over our kneeboards.

  “I’ve decided every flight we make will count as a sortie. Even instrument hops, which we will be starting today and continuing until everyone is caught up on their yearly requirements. Of course we will also be flying our regular support missions.”

  He turns to confer with the admin officer. I gather up my flight gear, and head for the flight line. It’s my turn in the barrel. I’m scheduled to fly with the Hammer. An instrument hop, no big deal, but I’m muy nervioso.

  The pre-flight and pre-start checks are uneventful. Maybe it will be a pleasant enough hop after all. The Hammer presses the starter and flips on the mags. The starter grinds and as the Hammer fingers the primer, the engine coughs, catches, sputters and rumbles unevenly. The Hammer jockeys the throttle and nods his head. Interpreting the nod to mean he is ready, I ram the mixture handle forward. The RPM gauge zings through 2500 turns before the Hammer can back off the throttle. The engine sputters, then settles to an even roar. The Hammer glowers at me.

  “What in god-forsaking hell did you do that for?”

  I yearn to turn down the intercom volume, but respond clearly. “You nodded your head, sir. I thought you were signaling for the mixture.”

  Doubt dances in his eyes. “Maybe I did. I don’t remember it. But maybe I did.”

  The fire in my gut dies to a respectable ember.

  “Sorry about that, Huckelbee. I’ve got a lot on my mind.”

  He checks the instruments and fumbles with the warning lights. Overcome by a flash of compassion that neutralizes my good sense, I say, “Hell, sir, that’s all right. I was just kidding anyway. You didn’t really nod your head.”

  I must have lost mine.

  “What? WHAT?”

  The Hammer’s face threatens to pop out of his helmet. His cheeks bulge against the sides of the plastic liner, his eyes are red-veined and distended.

  “No. No sir …” I stammer. “I was joking, sir … only joking … you really did nod …”

  “Out.”

  His arm reaches toward me like a long thin rapier in a nightmare death-dream, his finger extended, pointed at my chest.

  “Out. Out of my plane. Out before I …”

  I jump from the cockpit. My helmet rips the radio cords loose. I fall to the apron and run for the line shack, with the crew chiefs guffawing in my wake. An ignominious show but worth the embarrassment, considering I don’t have to fly with the Hammer, flight schedule be damned.

  “Send Warrant Officer Hastings out here,” The Hammer yells after me.

  Warrant Officer Chuck “Cool Beans” Hastings, taciturn, cigarette in the corner of his mouth, has been in the Marine Corps longer than anyone else in the squadron. As an enlisted aircraft technician at the tail end of World War Two he had to fly the planes when they were short of pilots so they made him a Warrant Officer and sent him to flight school. After flying fixed wings in Korea he transitioned to helicopters. He’s seen it all—unflappable.

  I go in the line shack and pass on the message, then get out of there. Walking to the ready room tent I spot an old, scraggly bearded Vietnamese laborer fishing around in a metal trash container. I nod and bow and he continues to root.

  A stack of books and pamphlets are piled on the ground. I lift one and check the title: “Tactics Of Marine Corps Helicopter Operations.” I check out the rest of the pile and then look inside the trash bin. Someone threw away his correspondence texts from the Marine Corps Institute. This could be a problem. Those books and pamphlets are outdated and worthless to us, but still…. I can see it now, smuggled out of camp to a VC area, passed on up the line, Ho Chi Minh’s eyes light up … this is top stuff, send message to old man, keep rooting in the trash …

  I hustle on over to the ready room tent and tell Captain Beamus. He goes out of his gourd … I picture him crazed, rises out of his chair like a circus monkey performing for a peanut, three flips, two circles, then falls back on the ground, froth billowing around his mouth…. He comes back in focus and says, “Who? Where? Take me to him.”

  He grabs my arm and hustles me outside, eyeing each worker like he’s ready to shoot him on suspicion of dried fish farts.

  “That one?” he says. “That one? That squinty-eyed bearded one? I’ve suspected him for weeks.”

  The Rajah is on the old fellow like a weasel on a rat, and the only thing the poor guy can do in defense is point at me, babble incoherently and nod his head, trying to signify I gave him permission to keep the books. I’m shaking my head, no, no, that’s not the way it happened. Captain Beamus doesn’t pay any attention to either one of us. Taking anything from the trash is a heinous offense. One that must be punished by the most fearsome weapon in the arsenal of the intelligence agent based on foreign shores—interrogation.

  Captain Beamus drags the old man by his scraggly beard to the interpreter to uncover his ulterior reasons for taking the books.

  I follow at a slow pace and, when they round the corner of the tents, I slip inside the camp reefer and pick up two cases of beer, happy to let the interrogation proceed without me.

  Dos condenación, if Doc Hollenden doesn’t spot me with the beer. The Doc, somewhat recovered from our Tokyo adventure, is making a valiant effort to be a responsible flight surgeon to make up for when he staggered, drunken and bleery-eyed, off the plane and an enlisted men had asked, “What in the hell is that?” and another had replied, “I don’t know but it sure ain’t no Marine.”

  “Lay off that alcohol, Huckelbee,” he says, not realizing the irony of the statement, “you need a break to recuperate from your trip to Japan.”

  Yes, I nod, continui
ng on. “Don’t you no nevermind, Doc, nothing to get excited about, the beer will calm my nerves, settle my stomach.”

  I drop the beer on the tent porch and pop a cap. The breeze rustles the tent flap and a cool wind riffles across my shoulders. On the other side of the path Vietnamese workers toil like bugs, digging and shoveling, mixing mortar; laying bricks and raising timbers. One floor and one wall at a time the buildings go up and as soon as they are finished we will exchange places with the Army. Their chopper squadron will be based here in the delta and ours up north in the mountains. Reason being those underpowered Army H-21 Flying Bananas—even though they have the same engine as our choppers—can’t hack the higher altitudes along the demarcation line. But no tents for the Army pilots. They will live in brick buildings with running water and flush toilets.

  Cochran and Ben-San, emulating the Vietnamese workers, are digging a drainage ditch in front of our tent, figuring they can divert the water that continually threatens to flood our quarters. They burrow a tunnel under the porch, scooping the dirt out with their hands, working from opposite sides.

  Ben-San reaches under and grabs Cochran’s finger.

  “I’ve got some kind of creepy worm,” he says. “Yack! It’s pulling me under.”

  Cochran pulls until Ben-San’s shoulder is jammed against the porch.

  “That’s good. That’s good,” Ben-San croaks. “I quit. We don’t have to dig any farther.”

  Cochran turns him loose and Ben-San gets up and brushes the mud off his pants. Cochran looks over at the Army building construction. “Dig that.”

  Two Vietnamese workers are lined up one behind the other, swinging their picks. White bandannas circle their heads. Their backs are bare and the picks rise and fall in synchronized motion … like the beaks of primeval birds… thunk! … the picks hit and the pattern is destroyed as they stroke out of turn. Another worker sneaks around the side of the building and picks up a bamboo pipe. He takes a deep drag, puts the pipe down and goes back to work. Every few minutes another worker comes over and takes a drag.

  “What do you think, Mike?” I ask Cochran.

  “Hard to tell.”

  We watch a while longer, Cochran twitchy in his chair.

  “I can’t stand it,” says Cochran. “I’m going to find out.”

  He walks over to the building and squats down. He points to the bamboo. “How about me? Little toke, huh?”

  The worker hands over the homemade pipe, the bowl embedded halfway up the bamboo stem. Cochran wraps his lips around the end and takes a deep drag. He holds it in, then slowly lets it out, a thoughtful expression on his face.

  The Vietnamese foreman comes up behind him.

  “Not for Americans, “ he says to Cochran, shaking his head. “Very strong.”

  Cochran nods and hands him the pipe then returns to the tent.

  “Well?” I ask him. “Did you complain?”

  “Complain? About what?”

  “About them loafing.”

  “Loafing? Who gives a shit if they’re loafing? I wanted to try out their smoke. Jesus, it was awful. I had a hell of a time keeping from gagging. I thought maybe … they just might be …”

  He looks at me.

  “What? Spies.”

  “No, not spies. Just smoking some god-awful tobacco.”

  A few minutes later the workers pick up their tools and leave. The PX opens and the line snakes inside. In an hour the movie will crank up in the hangar. Guns of Navaronne. We’ve already seen it twice. We go to chow and return to the porch for a nightcap. A friendly procession of events. Although a Vietnamese outpost might be overrun twenty miles away, it seems far removed from our slapadaisical porchfront where we lounge like lazy braceros sprawled across ammo cans and rickety-ass chairs.

  I have the night duty. I’m supposed to sleep in the ready room tent in order to protect the maps and briefing notes from infiltrators, and to answer the phone in case Washington calls. It’s hot inside the ready room tent so I move my cot outside. The choppers on the flight line glow like bulbous green bugs in the light of the humpbacked moon. I spray the mosquito net with bugbomb, crawl inside, listen to the night sounds and fall asleep. Sometime, in the early morning, Doris Day materializes out of the darkness and crawls into my cot.

  I grab Cochran at breakfast.

  “Remember what you said about Doris Day?”

  He nods.

  “Well, she was in my bed last night.”

  “What?” he yells. “You bastard. She’s my girl. I didn’t give her to the whole goddamn camp.”

  Cochran starts to walk away then comes back. He leans in close and winks. “She’s pretty damn good, isn’t she?”

  9. Gesture of Good Will

  I said it, Doc, but I didn’t mean it … that thing about how a tidy war wound could be a stepping stone to a political career … when Hemingway’s kid asked if he’d be catching a fish, his dad said, “Don’t put your mouth on it, son” … double-barreled earnest advice … getting shot at is bad enough, Doc … getting shot is even worse … old Bautista, our handyman on the ranch, got tired of the big red rooster kicking the shit out of the little black rooster … so he blew some locoweed smoke in big Red’s mouth and when the cock went limp, he turned him loose … you can guess the result … little Black started kicking the shit out of big Red … so you see it doesn’t matter much whether you choose that side of a war or this side of the war, you got to go on the other side … the future side … when the kids take over … just like a young rooster takes over after the old ones end up in the pot … we Gyrenes are hard-hearted brutes, Doc, except when it comes to kids … no matter how fucked up the little bastards are … the skinny ones, the ones with open running sores, big heads, malformed legs … undernourished, dirty and continuously exposed to bugs and bacteria … they all have dysentery and probably always will … over half of them will come down with tuberculosis at some point in their lives … what’s their future, Doc? … what does the future have in store for them, Doc? …

  We’re up on the board. Part of a two flight assignment. Capt. Beamus and Ben-San leading, Cochran and me on their wing.

  Rajah Beamus’s asshole is always puckered, but today it’s tighter than ever. Where the hell did he get his flight suit cleaned and starched? It’s got creases for Chrissake. He stands on tippytoes looking us over, scowling at our baggy, bloodshot eyes. He straightens Ben-San’s collar, adjusts my pistol belt, glares at Cochran.

  Why’s he always the tight ass? Goes totally overboard about the regs and the appearances. That just doesn’t work in a chopper squadron where, unlike the grunts, we’re never on the drill field doing right shoulder arms, forward march, column left, hup two, hup two. The straight and narrow military life must be all he has, the only thing he knows, and he seems compelled to make believers of us all.

  That’ll never work with Cochran, he’s too big to fit the mold, but he sees me as a likely prospect to be a lifer, one who will perpetuate the code. It’s in my blood for sure, but why does he have to be such an asshole about it? Where’s the human touch? He’s going to get needled until something pops, then we’ll see what comes out, blood or bile.

  “This is an important run,” he says. “We’ll be carrying dignitaries of the highest order.” He looks around, makes sure no one is eavesdropping. “Connected all the way to the top …”

  “You don’t mean the Pope?” Cochran interrupts.

  “As you were, Lieutenant. Presidential relationship. Be on top of your game. Sharp. No screwing around.”

  He continues lecturing us as we walk down the flight line to the choppers, but stops talking at the sound of an approaching aircraft.

  An SVN AD-6 Skyraider fighter-bomber lumbers in for a landing. A crosswind catches the plane and the Vietnamese pilot adds power to straighten out. He slams on the rudder, the tail slews around and the bird slides sideways down the runway. It skids past us and careens into a helicopter parked alongside the runway. The Skyraider crushes the c
hopper against the fence where they come to a halt with the fighter-bomber’s wing imbedded in the helicopter’s belly.

  The emergency siren goes off and a crash truck heads out from the control tower. A jeep beats the truck to the crash. Three Vietnamese MPs jump out, pistols drawn. One jumps up on the wing of the plane and aims in at the cockpit.

  The crash truck roars up, spewing foam. Up on the wing of the plane, the first MP pulls the pilot out of the cockpit and throws him down to the ground where the other MPs grab his arms and hustle him into the jeep. The driver guns the engine and they race down the runway toward the Vietnamese end of the field.

  “Justice is swift and injustice merciless in the unsettled frontier,” Cochran says.

  “No time for lollygagging,” Beamus says. “We’ve still got a mission to fly.”

  Doc Hollenden comes puffing up. “Any room for me? I gotta get out of here for a while, take a break.”

  “Sure. Hop in.”

  We lift off and fly east to My Tho, the ARVN 7th Army Division base on the Mekong River, forty miles west of Saigon.

  Two Mercedes sedans sit alongside the runway. Resplendently attired Vietnamese big-wigs and civilian high muckity-mucks stand alongside generals weighted down with chestloads of medals. A bare-headed American, wearing dark pants and a white blazer, towers over everyone. When we’ve shut off the engines, he walks over to the choppers and motions us down.

  “I’m Robert Greatheart, assistant to the Ambassador. You will be making a VIP run today, carrying several important people—and one very important person.”

  He gestures toward the group standing in front of the cars. In the middle, everyone around her posturing in proper deference, a tall, slender woman stands aloof. A traditional white ao dai hugs her body from neck to ankle. A small parasol embroidered with sea swallows sits on her shoulder. She gives it a twirl and the swallows flutter around her head.

  “Madame Nhu,” Greatheart says. “She’s married to President Diem’s brother and is the ex-officio first lady of the country, since the president is a bachelor. She’s not to be trifled with. Her husband, Ngo Dinh Nhu is head of the Can Lao, what we would call their secret police. You’ll be flying her to Sa Dec where she will attend a formal dinner and, afterwards, address the townsfolk. Then you’ll bring her back.”