The truck dropped me and two grunt troopers off at the end of a red-clay street. The troopers were as green as I, greener actually since they had probably only been in the army six months at the most. The truck driver pointed to a building at the end of the street.
“Troop headquarters,” he said. “Report there.”
We hoisted gear on our shoulders and walked between rows of the tin-roof buildings. Some were smaller, some larger, all with open screened-in half-sides. Overhanging awnings protected the screens from sun and rain. All the buildings sat on concrete blocks to raise them up from the ground.
Off to one side, behind some barracks, was a short helicopter landing strip with Huey slicks parked in L-shaped concrete and sandbagged revetments on one side and mean-looking Cobra gunships in revetments on the other. Farther down were the Loaches. All the helicopters were marked with yellow triangles on the doors to identify them as Apache Troop. As nose art, the Cobras looked predatory with red-and-white sharks’ jaws, while the Hueys bore crossed sabers above the bold proclamation Headhunters.
The idea of hunting heads was a bit disconcerting. Stones painted white lined the walkway leading up to the door of the sergeant major’s hooch at Troop headquarters. I half-expected to find a shrunken skull hanging on the wall of his office.
Sergeant Major Rogers was a big bluff man with reddish-gray hair cropped so short his skull looked sunburned. He stood up behind his desk. There were no shrunken heads or strings of ears; I looked.
“Welcome to beautiful Tay Ninh and the First Cav,” the sergeant major growled. He sounded a little sarcastic. I understood why. I had already seen part of the post. “The old man is expecting you. He’s right through that door. When you’ve finished, we’ll do your paperwork, show you around and get you settled in.”
I knocked on the wall outside the open door and said, “Sir, First Lieutenant Alexander reporting for duty, sir.”
“Come in, Alexander.”
He looked me over. I expected him to comment on my height, but he didn’t. The two enlisted men reported and we all stood at attention.
“At ease, men. I’m Major Calhoun, troop commander.”
We had a short briefing, which amounted to telling us where the mess hall was located and assuring us we would thrive and prosper at Tay Ninh if we kept our noses clean and did our jobs.
“We’ll attend to formalities later,” he said. “First, let’s get you comfortable. We’re a crazy bunch up here, but some pretty good people. We look after each other.”
The two enlisted cherries were herded off to their respective outfits while I was introduced to my platoon leader, Captain William Cody Beatty, a tall, whip-thin man whose face and head were so sun-weathered that his brown hair looked brittle. Like Major Calhoun and the sergeant major and several other pilots I saw walking around, he wore a waxed handlebar Snidely Whiplash mustache. He stared at my hairless lip.
“This is the cavalry, Lieutenant,” he said, like it was something I didn’t know but should. “The cavalry wears mustaches, real mustaches. Have you got your cavalry hat yet? Don’t worry about it. Fork over a hundred bucks to S-three and he’ll get you squared away. Come on. Grab your bag. By the way, you can grow a mustache, can’t you?”
I felt my face burning. “Of course I can grow a mustache. I’m not as young as I look.”
“I was wondering,” Captain Beatty said, nonplussed.
He led me to one of the long wooden buildings. The top half was screened in while piled-up sandbags covered the bottom half. A Huey took off from the short landing strip and blew sand and dust through the screens.
“We have to build everything off the ground to keep from being flooded during the monsoon season,” Captain Beatty explained. “And because of snakes.”
“Snakes?” I repeated.
“Watch out for the little green ones. Ol’ Two Step. He bites you and you take two steps and keel over.”
“Reassuring.”
“He’s not as bad as Charlie. We don’t have much trouble with snakes. I’ll show you why in a minute.”
Apache Troop compound, I couldn’t help noticing, was situated right next to the “Green Line,” the post perimeter. From the porch of my barracks, I could look out to a guard shack crouched next to a spread of barbed wire and concertina wire. A field of fire about two hundred yards wide had been cleared all around the outside of the post. There were more rolls of wire spaced across it. Bases were also surrounded by trip wire flares, land mines, Claymores, and foo gas. The green of the untamed VC jungle still appeared uncomfortably close. I recalled how Minh the Kit Carson scout had slipped through all that wire and mines at An Khe to hurl a satchel charge at us. What prevented a real VC from doing that to us here?
“Our quarters are right next to the flight line,” Beatty said. “You won’t have any trouble waking up when the first choppers light up. We call it ‘Apache Sunrise.’ It comes before regular sunrise.”
“How do you see the enemy in the dark?” I asked.
“About the only thing that flies around here after dark are incoming mortar rounds unless we have to put in troops or extract them. We usually don’t start work until the low birds can see down through the trees. The dinks come across the border as soon as it gets dark, hit one of our fire support bases out in the bush, then try to shag it back across the border into Cambodia before the sun comes up. When we’re lucky, we catch their yellow asses trying to cross just as the sun comes up.”
There were six sets of bunks and wooden wall lockers inside the barracks, three on each side. Mosquito nets were draped over each bunk, isolating it and offering a degree of privacy. One guy was sleeping. Otherwise, the barracks was empty. One of the bunks was stripped and its mattress folded back. Captain Beatty pulled a chain above it and an electric light went on. I assumed fuel-burning generators supplied the power.
“Take that one,” Beatty invited. “It belonged to your predecessor.”
“What happened to him?”
Beatty shrugged. “He went down. Out there.”
I asked no more questions. I didn’t want to know.
“The showers and the ash can crappers are outside,” Beatty continued. “Toss your gear and I’ll show you the rest. There’s a bunker right around the corner from the barracks where you can run to when the gooks get frisky and the incoming siren goes off.”
It was a piece of steel culvert pipe about five feet in diameter and twenty feet long, open at both ends and covered between with soil and piled sandbags.
On the way to the mess hall, Beatty showed me a small pen surrounded by sandbags. Inside was a pair of small brownish animals that resembled ferrets.
“Mongooses. Or is it mongeese?” Beatty grinned. “That’s why we aren’t bothered with snakes. Yosemite Sam and Pepe LePhew are little snake and rat getters. They have the run of the place. Sometimes one of the Blues catches a cobra out there and we really have a show.”
The way I felt about snakes, Sam and Pepe were going to be my best friends.
When we walked through the door to the mess hall, I noticed a kitchen area to my right and two large dining areas studded with wooden tables to my left. One area was for enlisted, the other for officers and warrants. We had coffee while Captain Beatty explained my duties as a slick pilot.
Apache Troop was made up of five platoons plus a small headquarters platoon: Maintenance; “White Team” Scouts; “Red Team” Cobra gunships; “Blue Team” lift ships; and a Blue infantry platoon of about thirty ground soldiers. My Blue platoon currently had eight Hueys, sixteen pilots, twelve door gunners, and eight crew chiefs. Captain Beatty said we were always short of aircraft because of normal maintenance, combat attrition, and lack of spare parts.
Basically, the Headhunters’ mission was to find the enemy, gather intelligence, act as artillery spotters, secure crashed aircraft, rescue downed pilots, insert and extract infantry and LRRPs (long-range reconnaissance patrols, pronounced “Lurps”), search and rescue, reconnoiter, support ground troops, provide air cover and air surveillance, haul ass and trash and whatever other duties the CO tasked us with.
“Most of the guys are out on missions now,” Beatty said. “Some of them are probably down at the volleyball court. All the pilots are warrants except you and me. Even though you’re a commissioned officer, you’ll still fly second seat to a warrant. He’s the aircraft commander. We want you to have at least three months in-country before you become AC. Understand that?”
“Clear, sir.”
“Can the ‘sir’ shit, Alexander. Call me Bill or call me ‘Blue.’ ”
“Blue” was the radio call sign for the Blue Team platoon leader.
The TOC, tactical operations center, was Apache Troop’s nerve center. All info and intel from units operating in the AO or from brigade or division headquarters funneled through the TOC. Maps and charts cluttered a wall in front of soldiers monitoring a bank of radios. The TOC was usually a busy place to be and was manned twenty-four hours a day.
On one wall hung a large poster headlined CHARLIE KILLS. It was my first look at a body count chart. Tick marks in squares denoted the number of kills for each day of the month. I added them up. So far in February it seemed Apache Troop had killed, wiped out, greased, exterminated, or otherwise got rid of more than sixty enemy soldiers. Gooks, dinks, slopes.
Someone with a ghoulish sense of humor had drawn two cartoonish vultures above the board. One vulture was saying to the other, “Patience, hell. Let’s go out and kill something.”
“The objective,” Beatty commented, “is to kill more of them than they kill of us. People’s lives depend on how well we keep our cool when everything is turning to shit. I’m not asking you not to let me down, Alexander; I’m ordering you not to let me down.”
Put that way . . . I felt a knot tightening inside my gut. How would I react when the proverbial feces hit the oscillator? I suddenly didn’t feel much the wiseass anymore. This was serious business. The Vulture Board told me that. I hoped I had it in me, the right stuff.
What surprised me most that evening when Captain Beatty introduced me to the rest of the platoon pilots was that none of them appeared scared or tense. They were all young, these combat pilots, as young as or younger than I. Some of them couldn’t have been out of high school all that long; one or two grew cavalry mustaches that resembled mangy caterpillars. They seemed to be a happy-go-lucky bunch of nutcases, real jokers. Watching them in the barracks, listening to them, I saw no indication that they were experiencing the doubts and fears that were making my guts roil. Shooting and being shot at weren’t discussed in somber tones. Quite the contrary. The talk was more on the level of college students returning from panty raids. They were like a fraternity of fighting brothers, members of a winning football team. I sensed the team spirit. I wondered if I would ever become a part of it.
Shortly after dark, eight-inch guns and 175s on the perimeter began firing H&I, harassment and interdiction. The entire hooch vibrated from the air concussions of the initial barrages. I dropped to the floor and was halfway underneath my bunk before I noticed the other guys watching me, grinning.
“They start banging almost every night about this time,” a warrant officer called Mighty Morris explained. He was a wiry kid with a blond mustache, short-cropped yellow hair and freckles. “You’ll get used to it.”
“I suppose you can get used to crotch rot too,” I cracked, attempting to salvage some dignity.
“Come on, little man,” Mighty Morris said, grabbing his guitar. “It’s after work hours. Let’s head over to the O Club and I’ll buy you your first beer in-country.”
The Officers Club was another hooch similar to the barracks. The interior decorators—previous pilots—had used a lot of rocket boxes. They were easy to come by, as the Cobras went through at least four boxes of rockets a day in normal operations. The bar was built of rocket boxes, scorched with fire around the edges for atmosphere. The walls were also adorned with scorched rocket boxes. A long piece of linoleum covered the top of the bar, with a bamboo rail around the edges.
Someone had gone to Tay Ninh and bought bar stools and wicker tables and chairs for playing poker. There was a radio and a TV with a single channel broadcast from the Armed Forces Network. On the bar next to the refrigerator stocked with beer and sodas was a cigar box, which served as an honor system bartender.
The mongooses Yosemite Sam and Pepe LePhew were already sniffing around and begging for treats. The club always smelled like a soured bar rag. Morris popped suds for the two of us and raised his in a toast.
“Salud!” he said.
“Salud!” the others roared. “To the Headhunters!”
Morris strummed his guitar and sang in a rich baritone voice pleasing to the ear. I felt a twinge of loneliness, of homesickness as the haunting melody of “Folsom Prison Blues” filled the club. Only the words were different.
“If I had my druthers, and that Freedom Bird were mine,
I think I’d move my DEROS a little further up the line.
Just to piss in potable water, that’d make my day;
And to sit on cool hard comfort, and shit my blues away.. . .”