by Dennis Foley
Easy bit the end of the cigar off and spit it on the floor. Lighting the cigar with his beat-up Zippo, he exhaled a huge puff of smoke.
“Jesus, Top! That’d kill a normal person!” Hollister waved the cloud away from his face.
“You know what his problem is, don’t you? He’s too smart, Lieutenant,” Easy said, stuffing his lighter back into his shirt pocket.
“What? What are you talking about—Theodore?”
“Yessir. It’s a theory o’ mine. I noticed it first in Korea-Inchon. The smarter ones—not the slicker ones, now, but the smarter ones—they got imagination. It can be a terrible thing for an infantryman. When it gets quiet or dark or both, their little minds start goin’ kinda crazy and they start realizin’ how fuckin’ dangerous their situation is.”
Hollister took a sip of his coffee and let Easy’s theory sink in a moment.
“They can conjure up all manner of evil things that them little gook fuckers could be up to,” Easy said. He knocked the ash off his cigar by snapping it with his finger. “The others, that ain’t so smart, don’t worry so much about what’s out there in the night. They tend to get everything within reach ready for a fight and hole up for the night. But the smart ones see a river in their sector of fire and start worry in’ about VC frogmen. They get into a large perimeter and worry about spider holes being inside the perimeter.
“Ya see, Lieutenant, the smarter ones ain’t yellow, they just let their brains work on flight idle. Gets ’em in trouble every time.”
“Your theory makes lots of sense to me, Top,” Hollister said.
“’Course, if you can keep ’em from getting spooked and killin’ themselves or someone else, they turn out to be pretty good NCOs later.” Easy stood, put his cup back on the side sink, and pulled his hat out of his pocket. “Hell, some of us turn out to be outstandin’ first sergeants.”
Hollister watched as Easy put his cigar in his mouth to conceal the huge grin under his hemplike mustache. “I’ll keep that in mind. Maybe I’ve got the makin’s of a top soldier in Theodore.”
“Now, that might be stretchin’ it a bit, Lieutenant,” Easy said, placing his hat on his head and glancing at his watch. “By your leave, sir? I’ve got to be getting back to that fuckin’ in-box. If you think you need a fine field soldier out there—let me know. I’m losin’ my mind in the paper war.”
Waving in acknowledgment, Hollister smiled.
Thinking about what Easy had said about Theodore, Hollister walked back to his hooch. He decided against telling Theodore himself. He was sure that Theodore would suspect that some-thing was up if he were to get that much personal attention from an officer. He made a mental note to let Sergeant Davis simply tell Theodore of his reassignment as a matter of course. That way Theodore would think that it was just part of the reorganization.
On his bunk Hollister found two letters from Susan, a military-looking envelope, and a bill from his bank. The bills never seemed to stop. There he was in Vietnam, and he was still making payments on the uniforms that he had bought in OCS.
He was only making about two hundred dollars a month in OCS, and still he had to buy new fatigues, boots, TWs, khakis, greens, blues, and a wide array of insignia and other items before he could pin on his lieutenant’s bars. At payments of fifty-one dollars a month, it would still be another half year before he was all paid up.
He looked at his watch to see if he even had time to sit down with Susan’s letters. He didn’t—too many details to get done. He decided to open the official-looking one.
Its return address read: For Official Use Only, Department of the Army, Secretary, The Infantry Center, Fort Benning, Georgia.
Inside was a sheaf of letters and brochures to welcome him to the Infantry Center. Every piece of paper had a replica of the single-bayonet patch with a “Follow Me” slogan or a statue of an infantryman leaning forward, waving for soldiers to follow him.
The top sheet was a form letter from a colonel welcoming Hollister to Fort Benning. It suggested that he fill out all of the enclosed forms and let the housing office know his requirements.
Requirements? On-post housing? Of course, if he and Susan were going to be married, they had to get on the waiting list for available on-post housing.
He sat down. He hadn’t thought about all the things that were involved in getting married and showing up at Fort Benning with a dependent. And how would Susan take being referred to as a “dependent wife”?
His mind started to run through the things that would be some sort of shock to her. Army words like commissary and dispensary, and all the acronyms, hundreds of them! She was a writer, but calling their car a POV was going to take some getting used to. He would have to teach her to recognize rank insignia, when to stop the car for retreat. She would be exposed to the world of the Officers’ Wives Club. He shook his head at that thought.
Hollister started getting apprehensive. Thinking of Susan and Fort Benning at the same time was giving him some idea of the differences between her world and his. He had been to her’s without too much difficulty, but she was in control there.
Now he would ask her to live in his, and he had no control over it. Everything in his world was logical, planned out, structured, regimented, based in tradition, and very static. Things didn’t change. Soldiers like him would come and go, and Fort Benning would be the same as it was when George Patton and George C. Marshall were stationed there.
His mind started to spin with the volume of things that he had to do and think about. The clock was ticking and soon they would be on the ground in the foothills west of An Hoa. He had things to do. He needed a beer.
He rapped on the tent frame because it was customary, even though Captains Michaelson and Shaw could see him through the dust-clogged screen. “Sir, you got a minute?”
“Get in here, Hollister,” Shaw yelled out.
He entered with the packet from Fort Benning in his hand. “Heads up!” Shaw pitched him a cold San Miguel.
Hollister caught the beer but dropped the envelope.
“Well, well … what have we here? ‘On behalf of the commandant, let me welcome you to the Infantry School. …’” Captain Michaelson mocked the standard welcome. “I’ve received one or two of those packets myself.”
“That’s why I came by, sir. I’m over my head with this.” Hollister picked up the envelope and raised the forms. “How much of this stuff do I actually need to fill out and send them—and how soon?”
Shaw threw a church key to Hollister. “I once worked for a colonel at Fort Bragg who used to take all the paperwork that was left over on his desk on Friday afternoons, stuff it in an envelope, mark it ‘Forward to: U.S. Army Alaska,’ and send it to the Message Center.
“I finally asked him what he was doing. He told me that anything that was important would find its way back to his desk at Fort Bragg. The rest would die a natural death. I asked him why he did it every Friday. He told me that he didn’t want anything on his desk to make him late for Happy Hour.”
Hollister laughed. “That mean I should send this stuff to Alaska?”
Michaelson took the papers from Hollister and rapidly sorted. He ended up with a large stack and a short stack. He raised the short stack. “Fill these out. These are important—housing request, checking account application, club card application, and an application for night school at American University’s extension courses. That’s all you need to keep you afloat. Everything else they can track you down and beat you up for.”
“I don’t have to fill out that application for membership to the Post Rod and Gun Club?”
Michaelson looked up. “I’ll take care of your marksmanship training, and those river ambushes will give you a chance to bag your limit. So, finish that beer and get on with the business.”
Back in his hooch, Hollister sat at his desk filling out the forms while Lieutenants Virgil and Rogers got ready for their first LRP patrols.
The hooch space was so cramped that Rogers finally gave up and took a
ll his field gear outside to check everything for completeness and rerig it.
The field phone, back in working order, rang once, and Hollister retrieved the handset from under the completed forms. “Hollister, sir.”
The Duty RTO in the Operations tent said, “Sir, there’s a chopper inbound in zero five to pick you up to go to An Hoa city.”
“Oh, shit! Okay. Thanks,” Hollister said. He hung up and looked for his notebook. Getting up, he found his holstered .45. Putting on the pistol belt and finding his hat, he cranked the field phone and got the Operations RTO. “Do me a favor and call Captain Michaelson’s hooch and let him know that I’m heading to An Hoa. Tell him I’ll be back ASAP.”
By the time he hung up, the distinctive popping of the blades of an approaching Huey chopper was audible.
“Virgil, you seen my map case?”
Lieutenant Virgil reached up on his locker and pulled down Hollister’s folded map case. He handed it to Hollister. “I didn’t want it to get lost under all my shit.”
“Thanks. I’ll be back in time to hear the patrol orders. If something holds me up—go ahead without me. I don’t want to short the teams a minute of prep time if it can be avoided.
“And Virgil, this time’s a free ride. Just watch and soak it up. I know you did a good job honchoing a platoon, but there are some tricks here that these NCOs can teach you. Let ’em, okay?”
Virgil smiled and nodded. “Wilco, sir.”
The chopper got louder and Hollister stepped through the door. “Be back as soon as I can.” He kidded, “Don’t move the CP.”
“Airborne, sir!” Rogers yelled to Hollister’s back.
Hollister got within range of the chopper’s rotor downwash, took his hat off, rolled it and stuffed it into his pocket. He stopped short of the chopper pad to allow the pilot, who was making a downwind approach, to spin around—into the wind—and nail the bird onto the pad.
It wasn’t a slick. It was a clumsy-looking, overloaded, nose-low B Model Huey gunship—a hog. For all the grace and power that the Huey C and D model slicks had, the hogs were a strange cross between a chopper and a tank. Low on their noses were the barrels of miniguns or 40mm grenade launchers. On both sides of the smaller cargo compartment doors, large pods held an assortment of rockets.
The crew chief was sticking his head out of the chopper, looking at something behind the aircraft. He was also talking to the pilots over the intercom—acting as extra eyes for them.
The chopper settled, taking its weight off of the forty-four-foot-wide rotor disk. As it did, the skids seemed to spread under the strain.
The pilot’s hand slipped out the side window and signaled for Hollister to cross around the front of the chopper and get into the right door.
Reaching the right side of the chopper, Hollister found that Captain Iron Mike Taylor was flying alone. A door gunner was also missing.
Hollister opened the door, leaned into the cockpit area, and slipped on the flight helmet that Taylor handed him. As he climbed over the armored seat panels and under the cyclic, it occurred to Hollister that much of the first week of flight school must have included the correct way to get into the seat of a Huey. There just seemed to be no graceful way to do it and not end up sitting on the four-point safety harness.
Flipping the microphone down to a point where it just touched his lips, Hollister wriggled his shoulders to adjust the two shoulder belts. He stuck his foot out and stepped on the floor-mounted intercom switch to test his helmet out and to talk to Taylor. “You all run out of slicks today, sir?”
Captain Taylor was looking back over his shoulder at the crew chief. Without taking his eyes off the soldier who was working on the rocket pod, he answered Hollister. “Tryin’ to kill a couple of birds at one time.
“This one’s been in maintenance for a new engine and some linkage replacement. They just got all the guns and pods back in working order about an hour ago. I need to take her out for a check flight, and I have to go see Colonel Minh for the Aviation battalion,” Taylor added.
“Fine with me. I’ve never been in one of these babies—truth be known,” Hollister said.
“I know. You’ve been avoiding my offer for months.”
“I notice that you haven’t taken me up on my invitation to come out on one of our patrols either, sir.”
Taylor turned back around, looked at Hollister, and laughed. “Okay, smartass, I guess we’re even. Hold on a sec.” Taylor looked back toward the crew chief. “What d’ya say, Chief—we okay back there?”
The crew chief raised one hand from behind the pod, made a V with his fingers, and replied, “Be about zero two and we’re ready to go, boss.”
Taylor reached down to the collective on the left side of his armor-plated seat and slowly rolled on the rotor RPM to increase it toward takeoff speed. Taylor kept an eye on the twin needles on the tachometer.
While he was waiting, Hollister looked around the inside of the chopper. It was an older model that had seen plenty of service. There were empty holes where some of the duplicate copies of instruments were supposed to be. In the business of helicopter maintenance, they called it cannibalization. Paint was worn off all the surfaces normally handled by the pilots and crew. And even the instrument panel and the controls were worn.
The first time he had talked to Iron Mike about how complicated all the dials, switches, and instruments looked, Mike told him that it was really easy. “All you do is strap yourself in, touch all the shiny buttons and leave the dull ones alone.”
Looking up, Hollister was surprised to see sets of homemade gun sights hand drawn on the windscreen of the chopper with black grease pencil. Although the chopper had an articulated, collapsing mechanical sight, the homemade sights were there should a pilot find himself with a simultaneous need to shoot, fly, and communicate—hasty sights for busy pilots.
“Okay, sir,” the crew chief said from inside the chopper.
Taylor nudged the rotor RPM from flight idle to takeoff speed. “Comin’ up.”
The crew chief looked back out the left door again and then scooted over to the right to do the same. He replied, “Clear left, clear right, sir.”
“Okay, folks, let’s see if we can get this barge off the ground.”
Taylor pulled some power into the collective and watched the instruments. “We are fully loaded and the damn air density is fucked today. So, hold on.”
Taylor lifted more collective and pushed the left pedal to counter the torque that he was adding to the rotor shaft. The chopper got light on its skids, but they didn’t come off the ground. He tried it again and it still didn’t break fully from the ground.
Captain Taylor leaned forward and looked above and around him. He spotted the smoke from the burning shifters across the base camp and gave it a little right pedal while he tried again. The nose shifted to the right, putting the chopper directly into the wind, which was light and gusting.
“Hold on. I’m going to drag this pig up into the sky.”
He pulled up on the collective, pushed forward on the cyclic control between his knees and pushed the spongy left pedal toward the tiny Plexiglas chin window.
The chopper started to creep forward but not up. Taylor kept trying; the skids scraped along the LRP pad and then started to bounce.
Finally the bounces got higher and farther apart. When the chopper was about three feet off the ground, it seemed to relax and started to fly.
Taylor made a quick scan of the instruments, laid the cyclic over to the left and made an ascending left turn.
“You can relax now. We call this flying. I was getting tired of the thought of having to drive this pig all the way to An Hoa,” Taylor said. “I knew it would fly. It just wouldn’t hover.”
“How the hell is that possible?” Hollister asked, confused.
“I’ll explain it to you sometime if you buy the beer.”
“Okay, you’ve got a deal, ’cause I wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t just seen it.”
/> “The impossible is routine for us. Hell, why do you think women are so fuckin’ crazy about Army aviators?”
As they made the fifteen-minute flight to An Hoa, Hollister looked out to the rice fields and beyond at the hills where the ambushes would be set up. The valley was wide and green. The area was cut into squares and rectangles that defined the centuries-old rice paddies. At the corners of the squares were the thatched huts, in clusters that made up the hundreds of hamlets.
The structures were usually placed next to the water source that flowed nearby and on the worst possible land. The good, arable land was reserved for the rice. The lumps, wrinkles, and knotted spots were where they put their homes and livestock.
Hollister thought about the rice farmers. Like his parents, they lived by the seasons and the weather. They went to bed each night hoping that the weather would not turn so sour that it would destroy the crops. And at the end of the growing season they all would worry about the market price of their harvests.
But no one was raiding the farms and confiscating the crops in Lansing, Kansas. And people weren’t worried about their children being killed in battle—at least not in Kansas.
Maybe that’s why he was there—to keep it from happening in his country.
“Beautiful from here. Isn’t it?”
Snapping out of his reverie, Hollister heard Taylor’s voice over the headset. He stepped on the intercom switch. “I was just thinking about how much this place has in common with my home back in the World.”
“Difference is that these folks have never known peace, and yours have never had an air strike put in next to their sweet potatoes.”
Hollister nodded. He felt saddened by it all.
While Taylor requested landing instructions, Hollister looked down at the traffic on Highway 1.
The two-lane highway stretched the length of Vietnam and had been dubbed the “Street Without Joy” by Bernard Fall. It was clogged in both directions by villagers and farmers, not one empty-handed. Some of them were already so far from their hamlets that they must have started long before he woke up that morning. Hollister knew how hard it was to live off the land, but he thought that doing it in a war zone must break a person’s spirit.
