Red Flags

by Juris Jurjevics

  I noticed a wooden box in a corner with half a dozen Mason jars. Each held a grenade floating in a pinkish liquid.

  "What 'n the hell?" I exclaimed. "Av gas?"

  "Three parts aviation gas, one part motor oil, a dash of badass battery fluid."

  "This your grandma's recipe for Molotov cocktails?" I picked up a jar and examined the metal egg seated in it.

  "Fits perfect. They work good," Miser insisted.

  "The pin's missing on this grenade."

  "Right. All of 'em are set to go. You throw the jar. The glass breaks, splashes the juice, and pops the arming spoon. Ka-boom and whoosh. Should scare the gooks good if we fry a few. Pretty good, huh?"

  I replaced the glass jar very carefully. "Just don't—"

  "Break 'em? No, sir," snapped Miser.

  "Fucking-A, Sarge. Carry on."

  An Army major buttonholed me in the mess hall half an hour later as I was trying to jump-start my overheated brain with boiled coffee. He sported a gray crewcut, aviator sunglasses, a chaw of bubblegum, and a small pistol buried in a shoulder holster that might have been his granddaddy's in the Great War.

  "Cap'n?" he drawled, inflecting up into a question. "Name's Hopp? Big John asked me to take you up for an overview? Says you want to see our visitors from the north, and something about fields?"

  Major Hopp of Gloversville, Oklahoma, was neatly groomed and compact in his comfortably baggy flight suit. He came by his flyboy look honestly. This was his second shooting war. He was all business and experience, with a generous dash of country yahoo. And blew the biggest pink chewing-gum bubble I'd ever seen.

  "Pleasure, sir," I said. "You're a Bird Dog pilot, I take it."

  "One of two." He popped his gum—it sounded like a gunshot—and parked it on his spoon to sip his java. "Yep. I fly the friendly skies for Colonel Bennett."

  "When is this sky cruise of ours scheduled for?"

  "We could go right now, if y'all are of a mind and done with your joe?"

  I took a last gulp and was good to go. Hopp pulled out photo reconnaissance black-and-whites.

  "An RF-One-oh-one Voodoo took these. And these"—more came out of his bag—"OV-One Mohawk overflight shots."

  He spread them in front of me and pointed out the movement detected at night using SLAR—side-looking airborne radar. And heat-sensitive photographs of emissions from cooking fires, bodies, and generators. I whistled, taking it all in. Miser had reason to be jumpy.

  "Lots going on up in that neck of the woods." He tapped the last photo and traced the blobs of heat detected in the mountains. "That's where we're headed first."

  "How about here second?" I said, and opened my map with the Aussie's red X.

  Hopp squinted at my grid map and nodded. "Can do. Let's roll."

  We stopped by my quarters to pick up my web gear and rifle, along with my compass and .45 pistol. Major Hopp's mechanic drove us out to the airfield at speed, raising an impressive plume of ocher dust. At the end of the long, straight stretch of open road, we passed the raised barrier pole and the Vietnamese guard shack, complete with comatose guard. Hopp popped a huge bubble at him but he never stirred. We were the only people at the strip.

  Hopp's plane was the standard civilian-variety two-seater O-1 Cessna, with rigid landing gear and a lone propeller on its snout. The pilot's seat was in front, mine directly behind. There was a clear canopy over us and a windshield in front, but you could toss grenades or beer bottles out the open sides without impediment. It was sort of airy.

  This Bird Dog had seen better days. Oil streaked the engine cowling, and the cockpit was skuzzy—worn and stained. Swatches of duct tape adorned the fuselage. I peeled one back and instantly regretted it. A bullet hole.

  "Great."

  "Say again?"

  "Nothing."

  The mechanic appeared. "Put on the helmet, Cap'n. It's miked."

  I tucked my boonie hat in a pocket, donned sunglasses, and put on the helmet the mechanic handed me. It was as heavy as a biker's.

  "Grinch Niner," I heard Hopp say over the intercom, "this is Pterodactyl Five Zulu."

  The commo bunker acknowledged and he sped through his preflight checks as the engine revved. Wasn't much to check off. His airship was pretty much a kite with a propeller.

  "You ready?" Hopp said.

  "Just trying to find the ejection-seat button."

  Hopp chuckled. "You can't punch out of this buggy. No armor and no emergency flashers either."

  "Amen."

  "You know how to use this?" he said, holding up a 35-millimeter camera. When I said yes, he handed it back. "Excellent. You'll earn your keep then, Cap."

  Hopp taxied off the concrete apron onto the metal planks of the airfield, turned, and gunned the engine. Everything around me shook and clacked as we bucketed down the metal planking and lifted into the air.

  We climbed to two thousand feet and churned slowly north over meandering streams and fields of crops. Almost nothing with wheels moved along the tracks and roads, only a forlorn bus with half a village tied to its roof, trailed by a single flatbed truck hauling freshly cut logs. Montagnard villages nestled in the valleys. Trails threaded up onto the slopes and along the ridges. Leaving the Cheo Reo basin, we sailed above the mountains. The peaks grew steadily taller. Soon we were in among them. Hopp took us down to treetop level and we sped at full throttle through interconnecting valleys, over dense foliage, most of it triple canopy with no real breaks except over wider rivers and several breathtaking waterfalls. The occasional interruption in the mass of green revealed colossal trees over a hundred and fifty feet tall.

  "Regulations say I'm to stay out of range of ground fire, fly no lower than fifteen hundred feet. Same as the lowest altitude for an infantry commander's chopper. They zoom around at ninety-five miles an hour at least two thousand feet up. Too fast and too high to see good. Bird Dog pilots prefer stayin' on the deck, flyin' low. Safer that way. Gives 'em less time to put their sights on you. And you see what's on the ground better."

  And they you, I thought.

  "We'll fly nap of the earth," he said, "and ease back to forty miles an hour."

  "I take it you've got a good supply of duct tape."

  "Not to worry," Hopp said, and popped his bubblegum. "Ain't a problem usually."

  "You're not going to turn me upside down or anything?"

  "Not unless you insist. And it'll cost you extra."

  As we got farther into the mountains, the growth thinned out, except around the many streams.

  Hopp passed back his overlay map. He had marked out the north quadrants where Phu Bon came together with two neighboring provinces.

  "That's the area Big John wants us to check."

  "What did you fly in Korea?"

  "Jets. Fighters. Now I drive this crate around Nam six hours a day searchin' for the little people."

  "Any luck?"

  "They stay spread and hidden. But I've got a rough idea where they're hangin' out."

  We roller-coastered along for another five minutes through tight valleys, some not much more than ravines, and dipped into a wide gorge. Our destination. Hopp pulled up and banked us into a big circle. I saw nothing but green. In the thinner scrub on the ridges and where there were openings in a tree line, I spotted a few huts. A woven bamboo platform sat at the end of a crude field, with tall grass parted along paths running through it.

  "I'm taking us lower. Don't get nervous. Odds are they're not gonna shoot."

  With that, Major Hopp descended and slowed our speed to a crawl.

  We banked and orbited in a tight circle. Below us, men in olive shorts were out in the open, playing volleyball. NVA, without a doubt. They paused, hands sheltering their eyes, showing no sign of being wary. A couple of them waved.

  "You see? They're being gentlemen." Hopp dipped his wings in salute.

  "Incredible."

  "Yep, friendly Charlies. They'll even come up on my frequency for an exchange of views."

 
"They know your freqs?"

  "They know my freqs, they know my call signs. We're practically on a first-name basis. Never mind I tried to kill 'em the other day. They don't seem to be holding it against me."

  "Major, how is it that they have your freqs?"

  "Wish I knew. They're always listening in, intercepting. A chopper or a Bird Dog instructs a ground unit to mark its position with purple smoke, and purple smoke grenades go off in four different places."

  "Major, you've been all over Phu Bon Province."

  "Yep."

  "Ever come across any huge fields of opium poppies? Or marijuana? I mean, a big cultivated field."

  I hoped he could confirm the Aussie's story and that we weren't on a wild-goose chase.

  "You're not talkin' about the tiny-ass patches of weed the Yards grow along with their tobacco."

  "No. Really large fields."

  "Large fields, well ..." He seemed to confer with himself. "No poppy fields—but weed? Sure, yeah. About half a dozen in different spots around the province."

  "Big ones?"

  "Yeah, big. Hectares."

  "Did you ever report them?"

  "God, no. Marijuana fields are as common as volcano cones over here. My mission is to find enemy to kill, not chase dopers."

  "Where's the biggest one you've seen? I mean, in the province?"

  Hopp pulled a map out, unfolded it to the section he wanted, and handed it back.

  "I'd say the one in Phu Thien District. They burned off the north slope of a whole mountain there last year."

  "A cultivated farm?"

  "Farm? Hell. More like a plantation. First time I flew over it I thought it must be tea. One day they were burnin' some and I flew through the smoke. Marijuana, take my word. More grass than you've ever seen. That soil and climate gotta be ideal. Some ol' boy is growin' himself one huge crop of weed."

  "Would it be convenient to fly over that area today?"

  "Sure thing. It ain't far. Afterward we'll go look at that mountaintop that's got you all excited."

  A tiny rectangle appeared and disappeared back into the foliage. "Whoa," I said. "That structure in the trees, on the left side? What's that?"

  "A stage. For coed entertainment troupes. They come in to bolster morale. Mostly musicals. Skits. Dancing tractors. You know, patriotic shit?"

  I could make out trench lines and bunkers at the edge of the trees, and shelters. Faint smoke rose through the canopy.

  "Their cooking fires are belowground," Hopp said. "It's their invention: horizontal chimney shafts in the ground that dissipate most of the smoke. If we're seeing this much, there must be a lotta cookin' goin' on down there."

  Hopp straightened the Bird Dog for a minute and tipped us into another shallow turn. A break in the green revealed a waterfall with a pool filled with swimmers. I glimpsed a bunker on a knoll, radio antennas barely camouflaged.

  "Three antennas," I announced. I tried to mark my map but got too lightheaded.

  "We're eyeballing only a fraction of what's down there. This is as crowded as I've ever seen it in this sector. They're usually better hidden than this."

  We corkscrewed still lower. "You'll see more at less altitude," Hopp said. The plane banked steeply. Hopp itemized what he somehow made out in the green mass: "Kitchen, sleeping platforms, storage maybe, trench lines ..."

  Observation from a low-flying, single-engine plane tipped on its wing must have been an acquired skill. I caught Hopp in profile, casually gazing out, inflating a pink bubble. All I saw when I looked down was broccoli rotating overhead. I had the sensation of falling up into a vortex. My eyes wouldn't alight on any one spot; they flitted ahead, fighting vertigo as we turned.

  "Where exactly are we?"

  "Circling Charlie's R-and-R center. Their rear area. A quarter of a mile beyond the border with Phu Bon Province. We tilt the other way and we're in Pleiku Province. The three provinces come together right here."

  "You going to call in an air strike?"

  Hopp chuckled and clicked his gum. "Nah. The Air Force keeps tryin' but they're wastin' their time. The Cong are too smart. Let me show you."

  He leveled us out and we flew horizontally. On the port side, a huge naked swath appeared, torn out of the double-canopy jungle. The gash was about the width of Central Park, and twice as long. Godzilla had plowed through, vaporizing the jungle and tossing enormous trees aside like kindling.

  I said, "Looks like the wrath of God down there. What kind of airpower did it take to do that?"

  "Two B-Fifty-two cells, three bombers each." Hopp recited the deadly math. "Six aircraft, one hundred bombs apiece: seven-fifties and five-hundred-pounders. Carry 'em stacked in the bomb bay, on racks outside the fuselage."

  "How many enemy casualties, d'you think?"

  "None."

  "None?"

  "Zero. The NVA was encamped on our side of the province border. Big John Ruchevsky snuck close enough to see classrooms, a rifle range, bunkers, comrades copulating. Got all excited. Set up a strike. But—surprise—when the Air Force drops by, nobody's home. Helluva waste of ordnance."

  "Ruchevsky scouted them by himself?"

  "He did. Prefers it, he says. Says alone is safer."

  "They've gotta be afraid of you calling in an air strike," I said, "after seeing damage like that."

  "It's scary, sure, but they know the odds are in their favor. It's not precise, just massive. Six B-Fifty-twos will pulverize three square kilometers—three kilometer grids—in one raid. Which is why the NVA spreads way out, so as not to get the crap pounded out of too many of 'em if the bombers get lucky. Wait one."

  Hopp raised his hand, listening to Cheo Reo issue an artillery warning. Then he resumed.

  "B-Fifty-twos bomb by radar. If the super bombers connect, the target gets vaporized. But often as not they're blowing up empty jungle—killing lotsa ferns. Most of the time the Cong moves out of the way beforehand. They know when we've got an Arc Light laid on."

  "Their intel's that good?"

  "Better than ours. They get tipped off way in advance. On the day of the raid, they get a heads-up from Soviet trawlers offshore that clock the azimuth and air speed of our bombers coming in from the Philippines and Okinawa. VC eavesdrop on our broadcasts that warn friendly aircraft of an impending air bombardment and pass the warning along. On the ground, their observers clock my Air Force colleagues overfly a target in advance of the bombers, and they sound the alarm. But by that time more than likely everyone's already long gone from the target area."

  "Why didn't we take any ground fire earlier?"

  "They know from the markings that I'm Army recon, not an Air Force forward air controller. They know I don't direct air assets and I can't call on artillery bases that can reach here. But if they fire on us, we'd technically be engaged and might just qualify for immediate support without having to go through the usual million steps and channels. Which is why they treat me tenderly, except of course when they try to snare me out of the damn sky with vines strung across the tighter valleys. I'm starin' down, not lookin' where I'm flyin', and they try to net me like quail. They'll only take the odd potshot to discourage my snooping when there's something on the ground they don't want seen."

  Hopp adjusted course. We flew south for some minutes and descended.

  "Here it comes," he said. "That badass field I was telling you about."

  Hopp pointed to long geometric shadows—structures—projected out from a tree line by the sun. At altitude, the field looked like green savanna, but Hopp brought us ever lower until we shot across it with our wheels brushing the tops. It went on forever. Acres and acres, circled by a narrow track. The whole side of the mountain. Montagnards worked among the plants, their upturned faces visible in the six-foot-tall growth looming over them. We'd found part of the VC's revenue source.

  A few green tracers sped by without our hearing them, drowned out by the drone of our engine and the slipstream.

  "I'll be damned," Hopp exclaim
ed. "Some fool's poppin' off at us."

  Metal crinched, like a beer tab pulled open. We'd been hit. He dinked the ship, and my elbow banged against the fuselage.

  "Gonna need more duct tape," he said. "That was close. Must be important for them to drive us off like that."

  "I think it's what I've been looking for."

  We dinked the other way and climbed, right up through a thousand feet. At two thousand, we leveled off.

  Hopp half turned toward me, chewing laconically. "Looks like we're not gonna make it to your Big Rock Candy Mountain today. I think that lone gunman put a knock in my engine. You mind flyin' to the coast? It'll take about forty-five minutes. We haven't got much by way of parts back at the Cheo Reo aerodrome."

  "No problem." I shoved my face into the air stream outside. I was drenched in sweat and adrenaline.

  We flew east, out over the peaks, winging across foothills and another mountainous region that gave way to a narrow band of rice paddies, heavily dotted with hamlets full of huts and livestock and farmers in turtle-shell hats stooped over their work. We crossed that skinny stretch in no time and were out over the pale green sea. A heavily populated strip flowed along the coast toward a formidable military base and airfield. A stubby peninsula drooped around a piece of the South China Sea, forming an azure bay. Despite the enormous air traffic, we were down in minutes.

  I was happy to deplane and leave my combat harness behind. Hopp explained his problem to a mechanic as they inspected the bullet hole and the engine. A spec-4 drove us in to the base. We passed mess halls, the Post Exchange, and a beach dotted with GIs in bathing suits lounging on pristine white sand.

  The jeep climbed up to a flattened peak with a hospital on top, an Air Force building, and hootches professionally constructed by contractors. Hopp led the way into the officers' club. The air conditioning nailed me at the door. The perfectly appointed bar was like a meat locker. I shuddered. Armed Forces Radio was reporting that young American anarchists waving Viet Cong flags had charged a phalanx of police in San Francisco.