love,
Billy
PS—Enclosed a Kodak of me and Cindy, the girl from Merrimac I went out with at Fort Knox. She came up and I got a pass & we went to Normandy Beach, ocean still cold but real pretty. She made me give her your address in case I go back on my promise to write from the Nam. See you soon. Hope you ace your finals.
OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA
Pfc. Hampson/RA 11949711
US Army Personnel Center
Oakland CA
May 24, 1970
Dear Danner. You wanted a post card of the Golden Gate, so here it is! I hear it really is red but haven’t seen it myself. Am flying out of here tonight on a chartered Braniff. Will write on arrival.
Billy
LONG BINH, SOUTH VIETNAM
Pfc. Hampson/RA 11949711
Company C, 227th Aviation Bn.
1st Infantry Div.
APO Frisco, 96490
May 27, 1970
Dear Mom. Arrived in good shape, landed at Tan Son Nhut Airport in Saigon and joined 93rd Replacement Bn at Long Binh Base Camp for reassignment probably to a chopper out of Lai Khe. Don’t worry, I will stay light on my feet. Temp, here is 100 plus and real humid, so am glad I’ll be in the air, cooler at 1500 ft. If you look at the map on the envelope (I guess the army is trying to explain to parents etc where we are, I sure don’t know), I am near Bien Hoa. No address yet, so don’t write until my next letter, have told Mitch the same. Talked to some guys waiting to go on R&R (one going home) at the Enlisted Men’s Club but haven’t seen much except the Base and the land as we came in—even from the air, it didn’t look like anywhere I’ve ever been. Travel broadens the mind—Nam is my first foreign country, will keep you posted. Write often, I like to hear all the news. Unlike the guys on the ground, I will come back to a base every night with the choppers and have an actual workday, will get letters within 2 weeks or so. Don’t know what else to say to reassure you, except it’s probably better not to watch the news—they show the hot spots. The war is hot in Cambodia as the news says, but combat assaults are rotated and a lot of the days will be mostly routine, mail drops, resupply runs, what is routine here.
love,
Billy
PS—Mom, I had a real nice time on leave and I want to thank you for all the fine meals and for throwing the party for me. Good to see all the high school crowd, and Kato had a great time, too.
LAI KHE, SOUTH VIETNAM
Pvt. W. Hampson/RA 11949711
Co. C, 227th Aviation Bn.
1st Infantry Div.
APO Frisco, 96490
June 1, 1970
Dear Danner. Am at Lai Khe, 3 days OJT now, am assigned to a Huey UH1-D chopper crew-chiefed by a guy from Oklahoma named Luke Berringer, short-timer gunner everyone calls The Luke. Pilots and copilots are rotated and I’ll be the resident twinkie on any crew for awhile. Berringer will be training me. He goes on about how The Luke is my shepherd etc and calls the chopper Barbarella. This is his second tour & he says he has an understanding with Barbarella. I share a hooch (square shack made out of plyboard & ammo boxes, sandbagged walls) with him and two other gunners, Gonzalez (Texas) and Taylor, a black guy from LA. They’ve all been here six months or more, know what they’re doing. These pilots do some incredible maneuvering and we’re all plugged into helmets, earphones, eyeshields, mouthpieces, like some kind of futuristic air riders—better than bomber jackets. Glad I’m not out there humping at night, wrapped in a poncho in the jungle rot. Instead, I come back here if I get my ass thru the day, and drink slightly cold beer. Lot of dope around but too soon to fuck my head up, all of a sudden there’s no doubt I’m here. You asked how it was at the very first—got off the plane, these American stewardesses and Muzak behind me, a sergeant checking the bathrooms to make sure no one was hiding in the can. Right out of the air conditioning you step into this furnace, I mean the air is cooked, 105 degrees, but the weight is worse than the heat, the air smells, sort of ripe and spoiled, like rotting vegetation or something burning that was rotten. Turns out they burn all the shit from the latrines. Guess they have to burn shit in this heat or it would get up and walk. Well, that’s all the (you guessed it) shit from here. I’m not feeling too bad. Take care of yourself and drop me a line.
love,
Billy
June 8, 1970
Dear Danner. Thanks for writing and also for the pictures you sent. Kato sent me some pictures from the going-away party at Mom’s. Don’t hold it against her for going out with anyone—I don’t expect her to be waiting for me like a nun. As for what I’m really doing, right now we’re doing combat assaults into Cambodia. Seven or eight a day from sunrise on, as well as resupply and mail runs. At least seven choppers, carrying six grunts or eight ARVN. We go in from Song Be or Brown or one of the other close Firebases. Circle for about ten minutes while the base fires artillery prep, sounds like the finale at a fireworks display. Then the Cobras (AH1 gunships) go in, clear the treeline with rockets. They break off on both sides and we’re on short final, quarter of a mile from touching down, gunners firing their asses off. All sounds good but the Cong figured it out a long time ago—they just hide about 20 ft. down in their holes, listen for the prep to stop, listen for the Cobras to drop and pull off, listen for the choppers coming in. Then they crawl up into the trees with their AK-47’s & their rpg rockets and fire at us from about 50 ft away. You never see them, you see muzzle flashes. Women’s Lib is real big with the NVA and the Cong—sometimes it’s women trying to waste us. You’re up there in the chump-chump of the blades, spotting flashes and firing while the chopper drops low enough to land the grunts. If you’re carrying ARVN and the zone is hot, they might lay down on the floor of the chopper and have to be shoved out the fucking door. On the ground it can be hell and crazy and you still never see any Cong but dead ones. It’s like they’ve just been there and turned everything to fuck or they’re invisible, raining ammo in. Like cowboys and Indians, except the Indians are ghosts and they can’t lose because nothing really kills them. Listen, I write Dad part of this and I don’t write it to Mom at all. I’m glad you’re staying at home this summer, but I can’t do anything about Mom’s being depressed. I guess she’ll get used to it. Right now her nerves are the least of my problems. I guess I sound pissed. I am pissed but not at you. I don’t know. Keep writing to me but don’t tell me shit about Mom.
Billy
June 17
Dear Danner. Am at Firebase X-Ray, about midnight here. Funny to get mail from you in the drop we’d brought out to X-Ray since our mail stays at Lai Khe. Your letter was in the bag by mistake. Weird because today was the hottest LZ I’d come into. Air Force prep had blasted out a zone with daisy-cutters, 5000 lbs of bomb that goes off at the treeline and knocks everything down so the choppers can land. Jungle green and waving and charred at the edges, and there were twenty choppers or more, red flares up for the dustoffs, everyone scrambling in or out of machines in this orange air. There were so many wounded we took on WIAs coming back from every run. The Medivacs were filled. Luke had a medic kit & bandaged the ones so fucked up the medics hadn’t found all their wounds, while I stayed on the gun. We did four runs into that zone, coming thru fire meant to score choppers before they could land reinforcements, but the last one was the worst. One of the choppers just below us as we lifted off took a rocket and we were close enough to bounce as it blew. Explosion hit in the center and took the whole bird. We were taking pops ourselves and had to pull away. After we got back, Luke told me that was my first day—air hot enough to char the asshole was always the first day. Not much time to sit on my ass here wondering is the war right or wrong—right is getting thru and pulling everyone else thru, getting bodies back if we can’t get anything else. I’m with Luke and the crew and we live in the chopper. These guys are the only country I know of and they’re what I’m defending—I’m not stupid enough to think my country is over here. Luke and me joke about how clicked in we are to Barbarella. He’s been shot down twice but s
ays she’s not like those other cunts, etc. Wants to take her back to Oklahoma and fly her over Bluestem Lake until they both die of old age. His grandmother is an Osage & says charms. Luke says B. is an Osage chopper living in the Nam just to save our asses. Can you believe it? Sometimes it seems like I dreamed everything but this, because what I remember was in the World. Well, my ass is beat. Like we said, keep my letters to yourself. See you in 344 days. I’m getting shorter all the time.
love,
Billy
June 24
Dear Dad. Things here status quo. Thank Bess & Katie for writing, okay? Have had a lot of 18 hr days this last week, no chance to write, but today we came back to Lai Khe late afternoon after resupply runs near here, so decided to drop a line. When I get time I try to figure how to describe this place. Monsoons begin in August but now it never rains, days are just blue and hot. The sunlight is so hot it’s heavy. I don’t know why I never asked you about the war you went to, I guess I thought I saw it in the movies. They’ll never show this one there, pictures don’t say how it is. If a whole operation moves across a field out in the bush, the sky can be full of twenty or thirty choppers in formation, and below them just the humped cattle and the villagers looking small in the grass. Even the old women carry long poles over their shoulders, baskets on rope at each end. The people all have the same coloring, and out in the country they dress the same—to me they all look similar, especially the girls and the children. Their faces look perfect in a way. We sweep across windrushing the grass, and they stay where they are. Our guys, the ones I’m up there with, are the best I’ve met, the best I’ve been with anytime. Maybe you know what I mean. I think about bringing a couple to lunch at Bess’s, then sitting on the porch swing (summer, of course) and watching a few cars go by on East Main. Big ambitions, right? Tell Bess to expect us and don’t worry too much.
love to everybody,
Billy
WESTERN UNION
TELEGRAM
MR. AND MRS. MITCHELL HAMPSON
68 PINE STREET
BELLINGTON, WEST VIRGINIA
INFORMATION RECEIVED STATES THAT YOUR SON, PRIVATE FIRST CLASS WILLIAM MITCHELL HAMPSON, HAS BEEN LISTED AS MISSING IN ACTION EFFECTIVE JUNE 1970 WHILE PARTICIPATING IN AN OPERATION AGAINST A HOSTILE FORCE. YOU WILL BE PROMPTLY ADVISED AS ADDITIONAL INFORMATION IS RECEIVED.
UNITED STATES ARMY
DEPT. OF THE ARMY
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Spec. 4 Robert Taylor/RA 21350688
Co. C, 227th Aviation Bn.
1st Infantry Div.
APO Frisco, 96490
July 5, 1970
Dear Miss Hampson. You may not know of me but I shared a hooch with your brother, Billy, and Luke at Lai Khe. Their chopper went down in a night operation west of Tay Ninh and I was in that operation. I was interviewed for the After Action Report, but those aren’t released most times and I’m writing because we had agreements, and Billy told me to write to you. He was real fond of you and used to read us some of your letters (the funny parts) out loud. All this is real bad for us here. Your family will want to know as much as possible about what happened. Night of June 30 we were resupplying an 18-man unit, just two choppers. We had no word of a hot zone but we came in very hot. Their chopper took a lot of hits, lifted off, started flaming from the engine at about a hundred feet. Both of us on the right of our machine, the copilot and me, saw the gunners jump more or less simultaneous. The chopper moved forward maybe fifteen feet as the pilot tried to touch down, then fell nose first and exploded. We had to pull off and call in artillery, and the area was not searched until dawn. There was nothing left of the unit, but they were all accounted for, and the pilots were with the chopper wreckage. If Luke and Billy had not got clear of the wreck, we would have found them. If they’d been killed in the ambush, we would have found them. Since they had no weapons or radios, it’s likely they hid and were captured as the VC pulled out. If they were not hurt and were trying to evade capture, they might have circled around as the fighting continued, and been captured somewhere between there and the nearest friendlies—which would have been Firebase X-Ray, about 20 clicks east. But there were a lot of VC in the area, doesn’t seem likely they would have gotten far. There is no way of knowing. I hope something more definite is learned, but I doubt it. I send you and your family my condolence. We have lost our own in Billy and Luke, but I hold out some hope for them, at least for a while. Luke was The Vet and Billy was our new guy, they were tight. They would have hung together if possible, I tell you that.
Sincerely yours,
Spec. 4 Robert Taylor
THE WORLD
Danner
1972
My father owned a concrete plant. He wore khaki shirts and work pants, the same kind of clothes he wore in wartime photographs when he was building airstrips in New Guinea and teaching the Papuan natives how to operate steam rollers. They could learn a good bit, he told me once. In grade school my brother Billy and I rode the Brush Fork school bus from our house in the country past bus shelters emblazoned with our father’s name, and the name of the plant: MITCH CONCRETE. The words were painted on the three-sided shelters in large red letters. The bus driver shopped at each shed to pick up children who had walked as far as a mile or two down dirt roads to the highway. The shelters were well built and didn’t leak. They had corrugated fiberglass roofs, concrete floors, and built-in wooden benches painted white. The bus shelters were not actually heated, but when they were under construction my father brought up the possibility of building sliding aluminum doors across the fronts to cut down the wind and rain, the blowing snow in winter. The school board said no, that some of the kids waiting in the shelters would be junior high or even high school students, and it wasn’t wise to equip the shelters with privacy. Besides, if the sheds were built deeply enough, a portion of wind and rain would be eliminated. My father followed this advice, and there was no recorded case of sexual activity in the bus shelters.
The shelters are still standing, well kept and newly lettered with the same two words, because the subsequent owners of the concrete plant decided to keep the original name. My father sold the plant after my Great Uncle Clayton, his partner, died of a stroke in the plant office as one of the mixers was being repaired outside. The plant was gone, and years before Billy and I entered high school my father was working first as a salesman for a heavy-equipment company, then at a desk job for the State Road Commission. The desk job was short-lived. He became self-employed, an independent salesman of heavy equipment, aluminum buildings, office supplies, or cars. In the worst of it, shortly before he retired early and drew a disability pension from the Veterans’ Administration, he was selling a doubtful brand of life insurance from a makeshift office in the basement of the house we’d moved to in Bellington. He had a file cabinet and big desk down there, both pieces of the same metal office equipment he’d once sold. On the desk sat a lamp, a large manual typewriter, a row of spiral-bound construction catalogs between metal bookends, a porcelain coffee mug full of pens and sharpened pencils, and a nameplate with his name on it.
These objects from the room in the basement were the only ones my father took with him when my parents were divorced.
Also in the room was a single bed in which my mother slept the last few years of their marriage, boxes of old toys, a washer and drier, and a discarded couch and chair from an old living room set. On the wall was Billy’s black light poster of Jimi Hendrix; I don’t know why he put it up in the basement, but no one has ever moved it. The poster is lettered in pale green and rimmed in pink; both colors are meant to glow. Directly under the poster is the ironing board on which my mother once folded the family laundry. The laundry was piled first in a jumbled heap of clean white cotton on the same single bed where she slept then, hearing the water pipes and tin furnace ducts make sounds over her at night. The pipes wind in and out of the basement walls, in and out of the ceiling, and at night they assume a dominance over the rest of the room.
> The subterranean dominance of the pipes, their silent twists and turns in the dark, are reminiscent in spirit of the last few years my family lived in one house, and the year Billy went away. He was nineteen, the year was 1970, and he went away to Fort Knox for basic training. Fort Knox is where they keep the gold and train the kids. I hope they trained him damn well—it’s the least they could have done—but I don’t know. I’ve looked through Billy’s Fort Knox yearbook many times; Charles Hollis, Brigadier General, USA, Commanding, was right: This yearbook will help you, your family, and friends to vividly recall the start of your military career. The entrance to Fort Knox is pictured; there is a tank on a broad stone platform and a sign that says WELCOME TO THE HOME OF ARMOR. The famous gold is kept in the Gold Vault, a bunkertype building that looks like a two-layered concrete box cake with barred windows. I think about all those gold bars sitting inside a well-fortified silence, row after row of gold bars. Billy was golden, in the summer; he got that kind of tan. I wonder if someday I’ll be forty and think to myself, Billy was a beautiful kid. No, I refuse to ever think that.
Machine Dreams Page 29
