Tan son nhut, p.2
Tan Son Nhut, page 2
The lead aircraft lifted slightly, the skids dragging in the tall, dusty grass. The chopper raced for the tree line a hundred yards ahead of them. He was nose low, sucking in pitch, trying to get out before the enemy began to pour everything he had into the landing zone.
“Nine-six, this is Eight-one, we’ve got a thirty spotted in the trees.”
“Lead, you’re off with ten. Fire all over the fucking place.”
“Can you hit it?”
“Roger, ten. Rolling over.”
“Lead, proceed to the Papa Zulu and hold there for further instructions.”
“Eight-one is rolling in … taking heavy fire.” Behind that voice was the sound of machine-gun fire as the door guns shot it out with enemy soldiers on the ground.
“Roger, six.”
“Lead, you’re joined with ten.”
“Roger, joined. Flight, come up a staggered trail.”
Newhawser relaxed then, letting the tension drain from his arm and hand and then his whole body. He was suddenly out of the line of fire. Over the radio he could listen in as the gunships worked the tree lines so that the infantry could get off the LZ. Unless something terrible happened in the next few minutes, he wouldn’t have to return to the hot environment. By the time the second lift went in, the enemy would either be so busy dealing with the grunts in the trees that they didn’t have time to shoot at the helicopters, or they would all be dead and no threat at all.
Using the intercom, he told the peter pilot, “You’ve got it.”
The peter pilot, Warrant Officer David Stockton, shifted in his seat and took the controls, one hand on the cyclic, one on the collective, and his feet on the antitorque pedals. He took a deep breath, as if he’d just entered the doctor’s office and had been told to strip for a shot. Satisfied with his position, he said, “I’ve got it.”
Newhawser released his grip on the cyclic and then sat back. He glanced over the rear of the armored seat into the mud-splattered cargo compartment and touched the floor-mike button with his foot. “How’s everything back there?”
The crew chief, Spec Five Steve Jones, let go of the M-60 machine gun, and then looked around his side of the aircraft. There were no visible bullet holes and no indications that anything was leaking. He glanced around the transmission wall to where the door gunner sat and saw Marino hold up a thumb, telling him that all was well.
“We’re fine back here, sir.”
Newhawser nodded and then settled back. He glanced at the other aircraft in the formation, watching them as they seemed to bob up and down slightly. And even with the single bullet hole in the windshield, he felt good. They’d gotten in and out without anyone getting hurt. Thirty seconds of terror, neatly suppressed because he was flying the aircraft, because of his training, and then they were out of real danger.
“Lead needs a damage report from everyone. In chock order.”
“Two negative.”
“Three, several hits in the tail boom. All controls and instruments in the green.”
“Three negative.”
“Four negative.”
Newhawser hit the floor button and said, “Five has at least one hit.”
“How do you know?”
“Came through the windshield.”
“Roger.”
They continued on, with each aircraft reporting either nothing or a couple of minor bullet holes. Nothing that would knock any of the aircraft out of commission.
When they finished that. Lead announced, “We’re heading back to the base. Officers’ call at the club one hour after engine shut down.”
“Now what in the hell does that mean?” asked Stockton over the intercom.
Newhawser grinned: “Means there is an officers’ call at the club.”
“But aren’t we going back? We know where the enemy is and we’re not going back?”
“No need for us to go back. Grunts can take care of the situation without us. The men on the ground, with gun support, are sufficient to take care of the VC. Obviously someone has decided that it’s not necessary for us to stand by, so we’ve been released for the day.”
Newhawser leaned back and put one foot up on the instrument panel and thought about the mission. For a kid almost fresh from high school, he hadn’t done too badly. There had been a year of flight school between graduation and his orders for Vietnam, but now his tour was winding down, with no more than eighty-two days left before he was on his way home to the land of the big PX and the all-night generator.
Like most of the pilots, like most of the soldiers fighting in Vietnam, Newhawser was young. Nineteen years old, with a high school education and above-average intelligence, which somehow hadn’t been enough to keep him out of the Army. After a year in Vietnam, he was underweight by twenty pounds. He had long brown hair, blue eyes and an angular face that was tanned a deep, dark brown. The bones of his face were sharp, and if he went without sleep for twenty-four hours, he took on the features of a human skull. It was a frightening transition.
Stockton wasn’t much different, except that he’d only been in Vietnam for three months. He had yet to lose the last of his Stateside fat and hadn’t spent nights in a bunker waiting for a mortar round or rocket to fall on him, ending his short life abruptly. He was still caught up in the myth of the great military adventure and believed in the cause for which they were fighting. If asked, he wouldn’t have been able to articulate the cause, other than to say that they were trying to defeat Communist aggression in Southeast Asia.
It could be claimed that Newhawser and Stockton were brothers. They were nearly the same height, just a shade under six feet. Although Stockton’s hair was darker and shorter, he had the same blue eyes. Those who didn’t know, suspected they were related. They were two of a kind. Peas in a pod. And neither had seen the other until Stockton arrived in Vietnam.
“You want it?” asked Stockton.
“Nope. You keep it. You need the practice, and I don’t feel like flying anymore.”
In the distance he could see the oval-shaped base camp that was Cu Chi. On one side of it rose a column of thick white smoke. It had always been there. From the first day that Newhawser had flown as the greenest peter pilot to the day he took his AC checkride, to that afternoon, the column of smoke was there. Once he’d thought it was because of construction on that side of the base, but now he knew that construction wasn’t the answer. It was some kind of a dump or landfill where they burned everything before covering it over, probably to deny it to the VC and the locals.
He reached down to the radio and flipped the switch up. The ADF was tuned to AFVN, and although he didn’t like having it on in the background during the combat assaults, he didn’t mind a little music as they were heading home. Rock and roll that was six months out of date.
“Flight, come up trail.”
The formation shifted slightly, one aircraft falling in behind the one in front of it and slightly above, to stay out of the rotor wash. When they had finished, Trail announced, “Lead, you’re in trail.”
“Roger, trail.”
They began a slight turn, approached from the north and landed on the open field to the west of POL. Once they were down, the flight splintered, each of the helicopters hovering toward one of the refueling points. Newhawser grinned as Stockton struggled to land. The rotor wash from the other choppers caught him and bounced him around, lifting and dropping the skids as if he was still a trainee at Fort Wolters. He tried to stabilize the hover, failed and finally, in frustration, shoved the collective down, dropping the aircraft to the pad.
“Christ, take it easy,” said Newhawser, trying not to laugh. “You’ll spread the skids and I’ll get blamed for it.”
Jones hopped out of the cargo compartment and walked around the nose of the aircraft so that he could help Marino with the refueling.
As they did, Newhawser leaned to the right and plucked the book from the map case at the end of the console. As he began to fill out the paperwork, he said, “Looks like we get to red X this sucker.”
“Why?”
With the end of his pen he pointed at the bullet hole in the windshield. “That makes it a red X. Can’t fly it until maintenance gets it fixed.”
Finished, he stuffed the book back into the slot. During the night a clerk would move through the nest, collecting the top sheets in each book in each aircraft so that he could log it all onto master forms. These would be sent to battalion, then to group and probably brigade. Someone else would look at all the information and design a series of papers and reports that would be compiled into a useless file for transmission to the Pentagon.
Jones and Marino finished the refueling and climbed into the cargo compartment. As they did, Trail reported, “Lead, looks like everyone is refueled and ready.”
“Roger.” There was a moment of silence as the lead pilot called the tower to arrange for a quick flight from POL to the nest. When he received the clearance, he radioed, “Lead’s on the go.”
One by one the helicopters took off, stringing out behind the lead aircraft. The formation never joined. It stayed low over the perimeter wire and then slipped along the active runway, slowly descending until they were hovering along the nest. Each then peeled off, maneuvering toward the revetments.
Newhawser sat back as Stockton parked the aircraft. He slipped it into the sandbagged barricade, sticking the nose up against the short wall. The rotor wash swept the interior, churning a cloud of dust and paper up through the rotors and then back down. Hovering there, Stockton pushed the collective down slowly and this time, without all the turbulence created by the other nine helicopters, he was able to land the chopper gently.
They ran through the shutdown procedure and sat waiting for the rotor to stop spinning. When it did, Newhawser climbed from the cockpit and took off his flight helmet. He waited for Stockton and they climbed into the back of the truck that drove up to ferry them from the nest across the runway and to operations. They checked in there, turned in the SOI, the survival radio, and filled out the last of the paperwork.
As they climbed the operations bunker stairs and stepped onto the boardwalk, Newhawser said, “I’m heading over to the club so that you can buy me a beer.”
“What the hell for?”
“Letting you ride with me today. That has to be worth at least one beer.”
Stockton shook his head in disbelief. “But you made me do all the work.”
“Of course. That’s the job of the peter pilot. You do all the work and I get all the credit.”
Stockton gestured toward the club and said, “Then by all means let me buy you that beer.”
They walked past the orderly room and the company offices, past an open field that separated the enlisted men quarters from the officer hootches. They arrived at the officers’ club, a long low, white building with a corrugated tin roof, no windows and a wall of sandbags about four feet high around the outer wall.
They entered the side door and moved to the right where they hung up their helmets and pistol belts. As Newhawser walked toward the wicker chairs and tables, Stockton moved to the bar where he ordered the two beers and paid for them with the MPC they used instead of greenbacks.
The club had a huge open floor that was sometimes filled with tables and chairs, and sometimes open for dancing, whenever they could entice the nurses from the Twelve Evac Hospital to come down for a visit. There was a stage in one corner that was brightly lighted. Arrayed along one wall were slot machines that used tokens, which could be bought from the bartender. Two huge fans stood near the open doors creating a roar but not much of a breeze.
Slowly the rest of the officers filtered in. Each stopped by the bar for a beer or two, or a can of barbecued potato chips. After a few minutes, Company Commander Major Howard Devane strolled in. He waved off the bartender and walked to the stage. He stood there for a moment, hands on his hips, wearing jungle fatigues that looked starched and tailored. He’d be considered an old man for Vietnam, nearly thirty-five. He had short black hair, a round suntanned face and fine features.
“Gentlemen,” he said finally. When no one paid any attention to him, he said it again, louder. Slowly the noise of conversation faded until the only sound in the club was the roaring of the fans. Devane looked at one of them and a captain leaped to turn it off.
Newhawser whispered to Stockton, “I don’t think I like the looks of this.”
One of the other officers behind Newhawser leaned forward and tapped him on the shoulder. “Last time this happened,” he said, “we ended up moving from Pho Loi to Cu Chi.”
“Shit,” said Newhawser, “and I had the decorator scheduled for next Tuesday.”
“Gentlemen,” said Devane, “let’s get down to business so we can go over to the mess hall before they run out of food…”
“How would you know if they had food? I’ve never seen any there,” asked one of the warrant officers lost in anonymity in the back of the room. There was a bark of laughter in response.
Devane shrugged. “I need five volunteer crews. Five ACs and five peter pilots. Might be a week, ten days, or it might be for a month.”
Silence descended on the room. No one looked up at Devane, afraid he’d interpret the stare as an assent. There was a single cough.
“Gentlemen,” said Devane, “if I don’t get the volunteers, I’ll have to make the assignments. I don’t want to do that because it just isn’t fair.”
The captain who had jumped up to turn off the fan finally raised a hand. “I’ll go, sir.”
Now Devane shook his head. “No, I’m going to need you here if we come up with the five crews that we need to send to Saigon.”
He said it quickly, almost as if trying to slide over it without the pilots hearing it. But that didn’t work. Everyone caught the words and realized it was a mission that would be staged from Tan Son Nhut, putting them close to Saigon where there were things other than 16mm prints of movies they’d all seen before being shipped to Vietnam. There were women in Saigon.
Almost as if an order had been given, the men were on their feet volunteering for the unknown duty in Saigon.
“Well, thank you all,” said Devane, grinning broadly. “I knew I could count on you. The names of the lucky few will be posted on the scheduling board by nineteen hundred tonight. Questions?”
There were none.
CHAPTER 2
THE WIRE SERVICE BUREAU, SAIGON
Robin Morrow sat at her desk in the city room, staring off into space. In the weeks and months since the Tet offensive, she had moved toward the front row where she could see out the windows along the wall. A bank of windows ran from one side of the room to the other, allowing the journalists to look out across the street to another building that mirrored the one in which the wire service bureau was housed. Sometimes there would be something interesting to see. Several times it had been a naked Vietnamese woman, sweat glistening on her body, dancing to some unheard music. Morrow had found that uninteresting, except the one time the woman had been joined by a naked man and the two of them attempted to make it standing up. Then Morrow had stood at the window cheering him on, just as her male counterparts had cheered the woman.
The city room was filled with old beat-up desks, many of them salvaged from MACV when the army bought new equipment. Most of them were painted battleship gray, though a few had been personalized with salvaged paint, the colors ranging from a light green to a hideous blue. Each of them had a typewriter, again a mixed bag, some of them old Underwoods or Royals, and only a few of them electric IBMs. The problem was that the power was so unreliable that the IBMs were often worthless except as expensive paperweights.
Along the back wall was a row of file cabinets that were supposed to contain information about any subject the reporters could want to write about. But they weren’t used much since the clerk who maintained the files had been wounded during Tet. No one else had the patience or the desire to do the job. Not when a simple phone call could get the information in half the time with half the work.
A row of glass-enclosed offices used by the editors and a few of the top-ranked correspondents occupied another wall. Morrow had yet to work her way to an office, though there was a glass cubicle she could use if she felt the need for a little privacy. She shared that with a dozen others, and it was on a first-come-first-served basis.
Morrow was a good-looking woman, tall and slender with brown hair bleached blond by the tropical sun. Her hair was cut in bangs that brushed her bright green eyes. She wore her standard uniform, a khaki jumpsuit with the legs cut off at mid-thigh, the sleeves chopped off and rolled above her elbows, and the zipper pulled partway down.
Finally, bored with sitting there and staring at nothing, she got up and walked over to one of the editors’ offices. She tried not to think about the letter that had come from her sister, Karen. Although it held nothing designed to irritate her, it had done that.
She saw Mark Hodges sitting behind his miniature desk, feet up, cigarette smoke curling above the newspaper he held in front of his face. She tapped on the door.
Hodges dropped the paper to his lap and looked up at her. He was a short, overweight man with black hair he had greased down so that the comb marks were still fresh in it. Unlike the majority of the people in Saigon, he did not have a tan. His skin was a chalky white, the result of a conscious effort not to go outside during the day. He hated the tropics, the humidity and Saigon. He hated everything about his job, except that he was in charge. That he loved.
“What can I do for you?” he asked Morrow.
She stepped into the office and tried not to breathe too deeply. The air was bluish, filled with the smoke from the cigarettes he’d started chain-smoking.
“That’s a good question,” she said. She stood there, looking at the soles of his shoes, worn thin with holes at the balls of his feet. The last thing she wanted to tell him was that she was out of ideas and that nothing was coming to her. She knew the source of the irritation but worked to keep it suppressed. She was bored enough to finally admit it, and hoped he could suggest something.
