Two of the Yards and Mac have wounds, but they are minor, so the medic has swabbed and bandaged all of them. We will fly back to Da Nang and have Doc Wang, the Project Surgeon, do any major stitching and repair at the infirmary. We have a better care facility than anywhere else in Da Nang for the indig. If we take them to the Vietnamese hospital they would leave them untreated, and in some cases would mistreat them, so we have built a complete hospital and recovery ward right there in the camp with our own surgeon and nursing staff. Unless they’re shot to pieces, most guys prefer going to Doc Wang, although he is a bit strange.
The traits of “extremely talented” and “eccentric multiple personalities” should be a harmless combination in most people, however, with the doctor you never know which one in particular you’re talking to. Two questions come to mind: One, which personality is working on you at the moment, and two, is this the one that actually graduated from medical school? The Doc changes personas like stations flashing by on the express run. It’s like watching a wheel spinning inside that inscrutable egg he calls a head. It’s rumored that at least three quarters of the possible personalities were insane, but only a few were violent at the same time. It’s a crap shoot as to who is going be there for you. Apparently, they all can cut and sew; it is the recovery you have to watch out for. You might get Florence Nightingale, angel of mercy with the demerol, or you might get Colonel Akira, head of the bio-testing laboratory in Manchuria.
In any event, the weather is spotty so they have no need for us to stand by for a possible Bright Light requirement. Mudhole is scheduled to launch into DM-5, and the next team up from Da Nang can be his Bright Light.
We get over to the airfield just as the C-130 from Da Nang touches down, and rolls off the taxiway to the offload point. They leave the engines running and the rear ramp comes down disgorging one of our teams and two very pissed off Donut Dollies. This is the nickname given to Red Cross volunteers, who are here ostensibly to cheer up the troops. The Dollies are complaining loudly to some Air Force major about the unseemly conduct of those “people,” as they put it. They are very upset about some sort of unwashed sub-humans, and apparently the bunch is still on the airplane.
One of the Dollies is rather mousy with butter churned hips. The other, the taller of the two, is a redheaded horse-faced lass, who, by her accent, must come from some Midwestern farm burg. She complains loudly and indignantly about one of these “people” exposing himself. The major rolls his eyes and tries his best to keep a straight face. She keeps up this nagging, shrill demand for social justice all the while they are walking to the cool refuge of the operations hut. I can see that the major is probably the aircraft commander because he is wearing his Dr. Denton flight suit.
The redhead and her dumpy friend shoot us a snooty look of disdain. Horse-face informs the major that she will make a full report to someone with commiserate rank. She plans to have something done about this outrage. I’m tired and dirty, as we all are, but this little drama is at least an interesting momentary distraction. She gets abreast of me and says, “Well here’s some more of the filthy bunch,” like I was some training aid for a venereal disease lecture. Obviously she has had her sensibilities offended by someone. What is more obvious is that they are connected with us.
I am aghast that anyone in his right mind would even let two Red Cross dainties even near us, much less lock them up in a plane with any of us for an hour. Then the answer comes strolling down the ramp, at least the who, if not the why. It’s Rick Hendrick and his team of Chinese Nungs. On a good day they look like thugs in a Chinese propaganda film, but today they are bristling with weapons and gear common to SOG. They are loaded for dragon slaying, with knives, pistols, and other assorted mayhem devices, and garbed in a mixture of sterile and NVA uniform parts.
Rick is actually not the giant of the crowd. Although he is almost six foot, two of the Chinese are as big, if not bigger, than he. He can’t get their names straight so he has nicknamed them after a couple of Donald Duck’s nephews, Huey and Dewey. Huey speaks colloquial American as well as any of us and he is obviously amused by something.
We greet each other, exchange news and gossip, and find out that their target area will be the northern A Shau Valley. He shakes his head at the backs of the two Red Cross witches and the hapless major, making their way off towards the operations building. We ask him what got their panties in a bunch.
Oh, they had all sorts of complaints; the Nungs smelled like garlic, were obviously low-life gooks, all the usual round eye superiority crap, and figured that none of the Nungs “parlee any Englee.” Rick was forward chatting with the flight crew when Huey looked at the two Dollies and, in his best American English, informed them that they smelled like cheap hookers on the rag, and that at least he and his fellow Nungs had the decency to bathe. Of course with Huey, once he was on a roll he liked to give you the whole show and full depth of his vocabulary in English. Short of capping him, there was no way to stop him, so he had informed Horse-face that he was curious about the rumor that was all over Vietnam about Donut Dollies making a fortune being hookers and selling pussy on the side. This had brought the inevitable shocked silence to the scene. They were in complete and utter outrage, which provided him both opportunity and encouragement to compound the upcoming insults by delivering them in a calm conversational tone, as if he were inquiring about their families or the weather.
Hendrick, their One-Zero, is not exactly adult supervision by any means. Try to imagine a seemingly soft spoken, giant ogre with a shock of red hair, and the ease and grace of a Serengeti Water Buffalo. The Chinese admire and follow him because his joss, or luck, is exceeded only by his intense love of breaking things. This, of course, negates any hope of Huey going inscrutable.
Huey continued on in a conversational tone, smiling all the while, that this Donut Dollie story completely amazed him because he personally owned a whorehouse in Nha Trang and he was certain that he couldn’t demand more than five dollars a trick for the two of them unless they had something special to offer, like doing it with a dog, or on a trapeze with a wolverine. Well, he might get ten for the two of them, but not from any self-respecting Chinese, perhaps from some lonely Spec-4 shoe clerk. That was the clincher; it launched them into some kind of toxic reaction. They went through all the phases, from first standing there red-faced and embarrassed with mouths open, then realizing the full impact of what he was suggesting, and finally igniting the raging response.
While Huey was demonstrating his command of English, the loadmaster had quietly slipped off to hide behind one of the pallets, to relay the ugly turn of events to the flight crew and probably look for a spare cargo net to throw over the estrogen kitties if it got really ugly. Good man, think of the aircraft first. The crew had informed Rick of the bare essentials and he got up and headed back to the cargo area, arriving right at the end of the wolverine suggestion.
The women looked at Rick and demanded he do something about these horrible creatures. He looked over his crew of cutthroats, then turned to the charity twins and laconically suggested that maybe they ought to try and put a calm face on everything, and do what they do when they are around American troops. All the while he was thinking that it was impossible that these two had ever been in the presence of words like hooker, pussy, cash, and tricks. This was going to require all of his skills at putting a pretty face on an ugly situation.
He starts out by saying that he is sure they have misunderstood Huey and perhaps they can appreciate the fact that the troops are bound for a dangerous mission. They need morale improvement as much as any unit they might have seen up to that point. Perhaps they could dig into their little Red Cross kits and come up with something that would make everyone more comfortable, like “Name that State,” which is a game where the doughnut crew holds up paper cutouts of states and when the troops guess correctly, they get a donut and a beaming smile.
Smiling, and solicitous, he continued. “Swell, let’s guess this one.” He deftly unbuttoned his fly, pulled out his John Henry and said, “Well, well, lookee here; it’s Florida.” Like I said, he used all his talents at compromise and negotiation. There hadn’t been much there to begin with.
That had shut them up, but they spent the rest of the flight sitting on the tail ramp bending the Air Force loadmaster’s ear. The crews that fly these hops know us, so he listened and nodded while trying not to laugh at them.
The major comes back from Operations and tells our team to load onboard, as Rick and his team move off and load onto the deuce and a half that brought us from the launch site. We walk through the hot wash of the port engines’ exhaust to begin loading. The smell of a C-130 burning aviation fuel is distinct from a Huey. Each has its own set of memories and triggers. A C-130 means traveling with no one shooting at you, a Huey’s smell will give you an anus tightening for the rest of your life.
Going home. The tension begins to flow out like water through a tap. We get up the ramp and the Yards sit and stack their equipment under the seats. Everyone has unloaded and checked their weapons so we don’t have an accident. It makes the Air Force real testy if you shoot a hole in their bird, although it amazes me because some in the inventory have more “100 mile-an-hour” tape than rivets holding them together. Not entirely true, the C-130’s are fairly well maintained; it’s the Caribous that are all taped together. We sit down on the red nylon jump seats and buckle in.
The loadmaster hits the ramp control, lifts the ramp, stops it just past horizontal, and we begin to taxi away from the pad in front of the Operations Center. The loadmaster comes by with his headset on, coiling the long umbilical as he moves forward. He makes eye contact with Mac and me, grins, and starts to lean over to say something, then stops and begins talking rapidly into his mike. Ignoring us, he goes over and looks out and up through one of the forward port windows. We are turning and suddenly come to a stop. The crew chief goes back and lowers the ramp. He gets out and walks to the port side of the plane, trailing the intercom cord with him. A few moments go by and he comes back in and he just gives us the thumbs down sign, nothing more. We are rolling again and it appears that we are going back to the pad area.
Mac gets up and goes back to talk with the loadmaster for a bit, then comes back and leans over and tells me that they have red lights on the number two engine. The plane will be grounded until they run down the problem. Shit. That means we will probably have to stay at the launch site another night, which means if someone launches we could end up getting sucked into a Bright Light. No! Uncle Nicky has had enough fun for the week. You know in your heart, that if it happens you will go because it’s your buddies out there. At the same time, you hate a fickle God and you find yourself making inane promises to the Big Guy like, “I swear I won’t touch myself that way again,” and “I’ll even go back and confess to stealing the underwear out of the girls’ locker room in the ninth grade, just let me go back to Da Nang.”
The aircraft stops; the ramp goes down and the loadmaster jumps out pulling the wheel chocks by their ropes with him. The engines feather and then shut down. That’s it, no more “go flyee” today. We get up and swing into our gear as the flight deck crew comes down. There is a major, and a captain and a first looey. Well, well, that makes it a pat hand.
The major we know. He grins and shrugs and tells us he’s sorry, but they will be staying overnight due to technical problems. He explains that there is a Caribou coming in. The Air Force is going to put us on it and send it back to Da Nang. Thank you, God. I swear I’ll keep those promises just as soon as stand down is over.
The major has his hand on Mac’s shoulder and says, “Look you might want to make yourself scarce over there in one of the revetments.” He says he’ll have the Operations Center send a jeep over when the bird is about fifteen minutes out. He points to an area about two hundred yards from the Operations Center. “That will give you time to get over there where the aircraft will set to pick you guys up.” He confides to us, “This is for your own good. That redhead,” meaning the taller of the Red Cross troopies, “was on the phone with my boss, which won’t do her any good because he has more important things to do, but she is just the type to take this to someone who will want to ingratiate himself on their charms. I know you guys didn’t do anything, but if she gets the right set of ears they could cause you to miss your Caribou.”
I hate Donut Dollies at this point. All the memories come back to me of being forced to attend their inane little shows when I was a private. They would always come around to boost the morale of the troops, prancing themselves around like they were raving beauty queens, when the stuck-up little snots wouldn’t give a lowly enlisted man the time of day. All of them were looking for some officer to marry. Well to be fair, I have met two or three that had real charity in their hearts. It didn’t mean they were going to hand out any shorts to anyone, but there were a few who actually seemed to care about what they were doing. I doubt Dumpy and the redhead are playing on the same team.
They will probably come screaming back here with some Lieutenant Colonel of the Manners Police. We, the innocent, will get hauled in for questioning because those types of twits come with a platoon of MPs and Cadillac Gauge Armored Cars, all of them full of regulation self- righteousness. We are totally innocent, but they will screw us out of our ride back to Da Nang, sure as Davy Crockett liked bear pussy.
This kicks in the tactical side of my brain, which is the side not directly responsible for body functions and pornographic images. Let them come, we have enough ammo left with the B-40s and the claymores and all the other stuff we didn’t fire saving our asses that we can probably kill a couple hundred of them. I have the CAC codes from yesterday. We can get on the radio and lie to Covey in order to get some air assets with some napalm and some CBUs. Yes, and get that worthless shit, Hendrick, and those Chinese bandits of his to flank them. It is their fault we are in this mess. Let him and his star English student work for a living.
If we can get enough fireworks going, we can make the world a better place. I check my gear and plot the lay of the land. Let me see, I can put Bong and Bop over here by this concrete wall, and the rest of us can take the Operations Center, give us a crossfire that way. Yeah, we will take over the TOC, that way we can call them on the radio and tell them that we are hiding in that little building over there. Then we can suck them into a spot where we can catch them with their pretty little whistles, sirens, DR books, and shiny little helmet liners. And massacre them. Perfect, I’m going to move Bop up on the roof of the Ops Center that way he can lob 40mms down on them. I’ll strip naked and paint myself with camo-grease and take my SOG knife and personally chase that snooty, redheaded, dream-destroying, miserable, Midwestern, bitch from hell down and cut her heart out. I am actually enjoying the fantasy of retribution. I can see it as clearly as if it was actually happening.
“Nick. Nick!” A voice jars me back from all my mental preparations. I come out of tactical la-la land and realize that Mac is talking at me. The major gives me this queer look, like he just saw a bad dog. And Mac, who has some sort of Alabama swamp ESP, somehow knows where my head just was and shakes his. With the buzzing in my ears all I hear is “… team … there … wait … in shade … until bird … here.” He enunciates every word slowly, with a long pause between each.
You know, don’t you, my fearless leader? I was plotting our escape, just doing a One-One’s superlative job. That’s what I am here for, emergency planning. We could do it, and we could win. I hate Hendrick and his horrible little horde. Why can’t he keep his peepee in his britches without involving us in the clean up? The major looks me over real careful-like, shakes his head and gives a nervous laugh. He tells Mac before he walks off that maybe he ought to think about getting a leash. I wonder what he meant by that?
A half hour later we are lying under the Quonset of the revetment, baking in the heat. I’ve got my shirt open and am in that somnambulant state of baked boredom and fatigue that the midday heat brings on. The humidity is crushing and I am half-awake when Mac shakes me and says there is a jeep coming. I pop awake because I just know it’s the long arm of society on its way, but I am wrong. I look up and the jeep swings into view. It is being driven by an airman first class, with ears the size of cab doors and so many freckles he looks like Howdy Doody. He screeches to a stop and yells over that our bird is coming in and that we will load up as soon as it gets here.
“The colonel says you better get right on, Sirs, because Sirs, there is a major from I Corps Provost Marshal’s office coming and he will take your ride away, Sirs.” This is all done in one long breath, and then he hops in and squeals out in the direction of the Operations Center. I haven’t heard that many “Sirs” since the night we got caught skinny-dipping in the town’s drinking supply back home and my brother thought if we were real polite the nice policeman would cut us a break. Must be some sort of Air Force, Pavlovian experiment, thing.
We saddle up in a hurry and start to file over to the ready ramp as we hear the big props of the DeHaviland reversing down the runway. I have my German helmet on and am tucked down, hoping that we can get on the bird before Twinky Command gets here.
The Caribou swings into view, a big ugly, twin-engine job with a high tail. It’s slower than a C-130, but it is our ride home. As it taxis up, the ramp is coming down and we run up from behind and climb up the ramp. Mac and I dump our gear and go to the side of the aircraft facing the Ops Center. The ramp comes back up and the Crew Chief makes a circling motion with one hand then thrusts it forward, signaling that we are moving out. We are rolling, and then finally turning onto the runway. The bird hasn’t been on the ground ten minutes before we are rolling for take-off. As we flash by the Operations Center, we see an MP jeep, actually three of them, outside and a gaggle of pissant MPs standing about. My ambush would have been perfect. I don’t see the charity twins. Then we are gone.
The plane climbs and turns south and everyone begins to drift off into sleep. We are flying about 6000 feet over the South China Sea. They have the ramp partially open to let a breeze in. Caribou crews are usually earthy people; this isn’t the glamour girl of the inventory. I am safe so I drift off into sleep. No worries, we will be in Da Nang by late afternoon.
“Trung Si” Shake. “Trung Si” Shake, shake. I see Cuman’s face floating over mine. “Trung Si, wake up!” It is Cuman. I ain’t dreaming. I sit up, my mouth tastes like someone stuck a jock strap in it and I have a crick in my neck. I rub the sleep off my face and take out a canteen, take a swallow, then pour some on my head and dry off with my cravat. I am soaking with sweat on the side that had been on the seat. Cuman is sitting on a rucksack like it was a chair, peering at me intently. He has a concerned look on his face. The engines are droning along. Everything seems to be happy in our little Air Force world. Why does he look so worried? The rest of the Yards are real close, too, and they are all looking at me intently. They all have the same worried look, so the mugging for cash can’t be the reason they woke me up.
“Trung Si Nick, ooush, numbah ten, Trung Si Mac,” Cuman says to me. What? Has the little crapper fallen out of the plane? I’m half irritated; I’d been dreaming about getting laid. Where is Mac? I look around and notice Herr Combat Pygmy isn’t anywhere to be seen.
“Oush numbah ten!” There’s that “numbah ten” thing again, which means bad, or bad thing, or bad is gonna happen, or just plain bad, bad, bad. Everybody uses it. With the Yards it can mean a thousand things, depends on how they say it. Cuman has this “I don’t approve of something” tone. That means that Mac is doing something that is upsetting the boys or liable to get us all blown to hell. Now what? Can’t I just pass out? Will the little people let me go back to sleep? I test them. I let my eyelids droop. Wrong move, shake, shake. Whatever it is, it must be serious.
I look at Cuman and ask him what is wrong with Trung Si Mac. Is Trung Si Mac dead? Is Trung Si Mac touching himself? This doesn’t humor him at all; he is obviously upset about something, and I, in his eyes, am acting irresponsibly.
“Oush! Trung Si Mac beaucoup fuck up,” he starts out. At last we are getting somewhere. “Trung Si Mac no be flybing airplane. Tahan no like Trung Si Mac fly. Trung Si Mac, beaucoup dinky dau Tahan no like Trung Si Mac fly airplane!” Okay, now I’m awake. Where is our fearless leader? I notice one of the flight deck crew stretched out on the jump seats. Whoa, who’s flying this thing? I distinctly see another stretched out and I’m doing finger math. Let’s see, there were four crew members on this airborne junk heap when we left. So, there is the assistant loadmaster asleep, co- pilot asleep, assistant air wing asleep. I bolt forward to the flight deck. Before I get there I hear the unmistakable humming, the twang of South Alabaman, the Mini Mac, talking Air Force-ese. He has the headset on and he is flying this lumbering crate. I knew I couldn’t leave him alone. What the jaspers blue blazes were these zoomies thinking? Don’t they know he is deranged? The fact that there is one of the flight crew up there with him is absolutely no comfort, because the first thing I notice about him is the troubling indication of casual ignorance, like the drool coming out the comer of his mouth. He is half asleep as well.
No wonder the Yards are worried. I am terrified. How long has this deranged little prick been up here flying this crate? With his sense of direction, the odds are that we are probably over Hanoi and there are probably SAMs (surface to air missiles) by the hundreds pointing at us right now.
I’m looking for the “compass direction/anything meter” and also for the fuel gauge. I can’t find the right gauges but we are going south according to the sun. My panic level stops and starts to fall slightly. Mac leans over and says something to the ingrate in the other seat, who rubs his eyes, then swings into the jump seat to the right rear of where Mac is sitting. He grins at me and waves a hand, indicating I can have the seat he just vacated.
As I get in the left seat, Mac motions for me to put on the headset. I put it on and his voice comes over. “You want to fly for a while? I know the crew and I’ve got about a hundred hours in these.” Sure you do, and I am a donkey that can solve trig equations. The real flight person comes on and says go ahead. I look back at him and he has this bored look. What the hell, why not? I ease up and he is giving me instructions and lets me get the feel of the thing. Mac acts as if he is in total control, and I have to admit that he seems to know what he’s doing. This is all a ruse I am sure, since I am absolutely certain that southerners invented stock car racing and spectacular crashes on the same day. But because you don’t need the fingers on either hand to count the number of brain surgeons in my family, we are soon chatting and I am full of the feeling of flying.
The flight officer says we are about 45 minutes out. We are at it about 20 minutes when he says, “Go down and wake up the crew, will you?” I get up. I’ve been having so much fun I forgot the Yards. As I turn to go back down the ladder, I see eight little faces staring up at me. Cuman has a disgusted look on his face. I come down and shake the crew awake one at a time. I watch as they stretch and shake their nap off. Cuman looks at me with that disapproving father face, but I just go about getting to the back and sit down and smile at him.
“No sweat. Trung Si Mac fly all the time.” He looks at me then turns and says something to the rest of the Bru. They all shake their heads and sit back down. Mac comes down a couple of minutes later and we both light up a cigarette and start mapping out the stand down. We will pay the Yards, send them off to Mai Loc, and then the two of us will either go to Nha Trang or stay in Da Nang. Party time! We get three days if we are lucky, a couple of days to train ourselves back up, then back into isolation with a new target. As soon as they see that the conversation is not going to include any major explanations, coupled with the fact that both of their lunatics are now back here with them, the Yards are satisfied that all is well in their world.
This doesn’t mean that it is over. Sometime in the next three days I am sure that our loyal little band will troop into our hootch and Cuman will give us a long speech about how irresponsible we are. He, as war leader of the Bru Nation, is responsible for all the Tahans. He will be eloquent, and forceful, and remind us that our dicks are not the thinking organ. This will culminate in the issuance of a fine of say, a pig, four or five chickens, and some cash for the Tahans to buy beer and cigarettes. The opportunity to extract a mugging will be too good to pass up. It’s a good thing Captain Manes doesn’t stumble onto this equation. No, it wouldn’t work for him. We would just be broke, and then have to borrow money until we owed so much he couldn’t risk the chance we might get out of it by dying.
The time winds down and soon we are slipping into descending traffic going into the sprawling airbase at Da Nang. We roll down the runway and taxi up to the parking ramp. As we wait for them to shut down, a black deuce and a half pulls up to the rear of the aircraft. It is one of ours and Jesse Thompson is driving it. We offload and get the Yards on the back. I get on with them, and Mac climbs in the front with Jesse. Jesse looks up at me and says, “I hear you guys got shot out of DM Ten. They say they are going to put Eldon’s team in or Murphy’s after the B-52s work it over.” He lets the clutch out and we are motoring out of the airbase.
Once past the front gate, the ordered, neat, manicured facility gives way to the teeming metropolis of Da Nang City. This means the sickly sweet aroma of the Orient, and packed streets, a mixture of Honda cycles, garish buses, and military vehicles snaking between the close-knit, haphazard architecture of “build-as-you-grow” on both sides of the road. It takes us about an hour to negotiate our way to the I Corps Bridge which spans the river. There are machine gun posts and military checkpoints on the western side, matched by their twins on the eastern side. It is a big structure and from the back of the truck I can see the German hospital ship, the Helgoland, berthed with a multitude of other ships that bring in everything that keep the war effort and the economy going. The wind feels good. The Yards are laughing and making suggestive comments at the numerous pretty girls that we pass along the side of the road.
The bridge road narrows into a two-lane blacktop. There are six lanes of traffic trying to squeeze into it, but it is moving fairly quickly. However, Jesse shouts back to have the Yards stand to. The favorite trick lately has been to have some poor ARVN veterans who are double amputees roll out in the roadway to stop traffic. Of course, the average GI from “Scrubbed-Face America” will stop, then, bang, there’s a gun in the face, he’s hauled out and beaten up, then the vehicle and the load taken. They tried this on one of our trucks about a week ago coming back from the airfield. The Viet driver merely downshifted, poured on the gas and kept going, turning a couple of them into red spots on the road. Because our vehicles are painted black, they give them a wide berth if they see one coming now.
Just before we get to the comer, traffic slows but doesn’t stop. There is a five-ton Army semi stopped at the comer, and the MPs are there. Curled up under the left front wheel well is a jeep with two very dead GIs in it. It is a bad accident. We notice it is one of our jeeps. Jesse says, “Don’t worry. It isn’t anyone from Recon. It’s some cherry lieutenant from S-4 and that asshole from Security Company that was afraid of his own shadow. You know, the E-7 that wouldn’t go outside the wire unless he had ten strikers to go with him.” The five-ton was driven by some leg with a pick stuck in an Afro big enough to be a helmet. He is so hopped up on heroin that you can tell it from here.
The MPs have him leaning against one of their jeeps. He will probably get drug rehab for this little mishap. I suggest that we ought to stop and cap the little drug-fucked prick just for good measure. Mac says no; let’s get back to the camp. We turn right, and head back south. After about a mile we come to the infamous “Gonorrhea Gulch.” This is a collection of ramshackle hootches off the side of the road. It’s a baaaad place, full of bandits and shooting galleries where the junkies from the Ash and Trash support outfits shoot heroin until they think they are big, bad, “Night Warrior Muthas” and stumble back to their bunkers to sleep it off. There isn’t any real order to the layout of shacks and ghetto housing. The place just sort of winds around with dozens of blind alleys and pitfalls for the unwary to wander into. It has a seedy, decaying quality, a twisted rendition of bayou burg and maze, all in muddy earth tones perched at the edge of the paddies. There is the scent of human excrement permeating every pore of the layout as well.
The place is full up, just like Da Nang itself, with the trash of the deserters. There are about 500 in I Corps, mostly junkies, who make their living robbing and stealing from the depots and hooking more of their brothers on that shit. One of our guys got jumped in there. They beat him up pretty bad. He came back with his Yards and a couple of satchel charges and did a little urban renewal. The black truck with us perched on it has the same effect here; they give us a wide berth.
On past the gulch we pass the prisoner of war camp on our left, and then it’s our own little patch of heaven. Our camp sits right at the base of Marble Mountain, a collection of martial order laid out on the glaring white sand. The highway is on the west, the South China Sea on the East. We slow down and turn in, with Jesse showing off his dexterity at downshifting. The two Yards at the outer gate wave us by, and then we go up and past the chopper pad to our right, to the bunker line and the second gate. As we pull through, a jeep is coming out. It’s Captain Manes. He stops and yells at us.
“Hey! You two numb nuts had better not destroy anything while I am gone. I’m going to the safe house and I don’t want to see you riffraff coming down there, either.” Then he pops the clutch, and the jeep starts to head back out the gate from which we just came.
I am incredulous; he’s driving our jeep! I can’t help my outrage over this obvious breach of etiquette. I scream at him as he pulls away. “Come back here! You thieving shit. That’s our jeep! We stole it just before we left.”
He flips us the finger and yells back, “That’s ‘you thieving shit, Sir’ you enlisted swine.” He laughs in a cackle and then adds insult to injury. “Besides the only thing you two are good for is getting me new jeeps.” Then he is gone.
A fine welcome home this is. Now we will have to steal someone else’s jeep, and the thing will snowball until someone doesn’t have a motorized seat. I realize that this is a good idea because that situation can quickly turn into a night of foraging to see who can come up with the most original theft. This, of course, will be a glut of jeep and other motorized inventory appearing by the morrow, resulting in Captain Chunky eventually having to go to the Provost Marshal’s office for explanations and recriminations. I would love to see his face when he tries to explain why he is driving the I Corps Chaplain’s vehicle.