In the bar in Qui Nhon, Tommy and I had been drinking with a ponderous sergeant from Texas who was wearing a patch on his uniform with a black horse head set against a yellow background—a First Air Cavalry patch. Ricky Duggan was in the First Air Cavalry Division’s Bravo Company. The First Cavalry had actually been an US Army horse unit until the middle of World War II, but now the cavalry rode choppers—six hundred of them. Its division had the largest helicopter force in the world.
I had asked the sergeant, “Do you know where Bravo Company is?”
He replied, “Yeah. They’re up in the highlands. Why?”
“Well, my stepbrother’s up there, and I’m trying to catch up with him.”
The Texan drawled, “Well, why don’t you come with me? We’ve got our plane.”
I realized the Air Cavalry pilots and crew had their own aircraft and greater independence from their superiors.
He was the crew chief. I told him that when I was in the Marines I had flown mostly on Lockheed C-130 Hercules—the huge four-engine prop planes capable of carrying twenty tons of troops or cargo—but I fessed up that I didn’t have military orders.
The Texan couldn’t care less about orders.
“You can run up with us,” he said. “We’ve got a mail run tomorrow morning. Be at the Qui Nhon airstrip at 0800 hours, and I’ll take ya’ up there, boy.”
Translation: eight o’clock in the morning. That wouldn’t be easy after the celebratory reunion with Tommy Collins. Luckily, the Hanjin driver was also running late to deliver cargo to a plane. He floored it all the way.
We arrived at the airstrip in time. There wasn’t much there besides rudimentary wooden buildings with corrugated roofs, sandbag bunkers, and some tents. It was a humble backdrop for the magnificent plane shining there: a Grumman Albatross, the trusty flying boat used extensively for search and rescue missions by the air force, army, navy, and coast guard during the Vietnam War. The Texan was standing next to it on the tarmac, and he was even bigger than he had looked on the barstool.
“Goddamn!” he exclaimed. “You made it! Okay, buddy, get on board.”
He loaded up a bunch of guys, and I was one of them. I felt incredibly lucky. We took off. It was the first time I had been in a plane over Vietnam. I saw the giant Buddha outside Qui Nhon, gazing out over the troubled land. From up there, the tree-covered hilltops looked so peaceful. But I knew that what was going on in those tangled thickets was anything but. The Vietnamese novelist Bao Ninh, who fought for the North against our forces, wrote years later in The Sorrow of War that the Vietnamese believed the jungle was haunted by the spirits of all the fighters who had died in there—from whichever side.
We flew about forty miles northwest to the Central Highlands and soon landed in An Khe, in Gia Lai Province. I thanked the Texan profusely as I climbed out. Other crew members tossed their mailbags out the door, and the Albatross immediately took off.
I looked around and saw hardly anybody. The First Air Cavalry’s Bravo Company was gone.
The few who remained took delivery of the mailbags and told me that their company had decamped early that morning to get closer to the DMZ at the border with North Vietnam. The men of the First Air Cav could fly everywhere in their choppers, so it wasn’t as if I could catch up with them on foot or even by jeep. The demilitarized zone was about two hundred miles north, at the 17th parallel; they could be anywhere at this point. According to the soldiers, their supply sergeant and some others were still wrapping things up about a mile up the road. I hiked up there and found the sergeant—probably career army, as he looked to be almost forty.
“Do you know Rick Duggan?” I asked.
“Who wants to know?” he retorted.
“I’m his stepbrother,” I said. It wasn’t exactly true, unless feeling like a brother counted. “I have to find him. Do you know him?”
“Yeah.”
“He was stationed here?”
“Yes, he was.” The sergeant seemed like a guy who had seen it all by the time he was twelve, and a lot of it hadn’t looked good.
“Um, do you know where he is now?”
“Duggan and the rest of the company moved up north.’”
“Where?”
“I don’t know where,” he answered. “Just north.”
I was truly bummed out, and I guess he could see that. After a minute, he softened and said, “Tell ya what. You can write him a letter, and they can deliver it to him this afternoon.”
“You told me you don’t even know where he is—but you can get a letter to him this afternoon?”
“Of course!” he yelled, sounding exasperated. “We’ve got a 1300 mail run going!” He said it like: “Doesn’t everybody know that?!!
So, I said, “Hey . . . can I get on that 1300 mail run?”
He looked at me deadpan and said, “Well you got here, didn’t ya?!”
I took that as a yes. It was 1200 hours. There wasn’t much time left.