The zone was going through some kind of quiet, relaxed period. Beatty said it was because Charlie was taking a breather between operations. Two months before I arrived, one of our infantry companies had been all but decimated on LZ Eleanor. After that, for the rest of December and into January 1969, the 1st Cav had busily kicked ass in interdiction ops in the Angel’s Wing area. Charlie broke up into platoons and squads the better to evade and hide and pulled back into Cambodia.
“They’ll be back, though,” Captain Beatty predicted. “They always come back.”
The guys bitched about it every night at the O Club.
“They sit over there giving us the finger and waiting until we’re not looking to slip over and kick us in the balls,” Mighty Morris fussed.
“We could cut the activity in War Zone C to zilch if they’d let us raid Charlie’s camps in Cambodia,” said a warrant named W. B. Farmer. He was a big rawboned farmer from Alabama with speech so slow you almost went to sleep before he finished a sentence. Everybody called him Farmer Farmer. “If y’all fly along the border you can actually see them bringing arms and supplies down the trails from North Vietnam—and there ain’t a cotton-picking thing we can do about it.”
Some of the Cobra jocks had a crafty way of dealing with it. Rather than return to base with unexpended firepower, they pointed their sharks’ jaws toward Cambodia and all of a sudden they experienced an electrical short or malfunction that released all their rockets in that direction.
Oh, hell. It was an accident. We don’t know what happened. Them rockets just took off on tneir own.
Vietnam wasn’t so bad. I had seen more action riding shotgun on buses in Santo Domingo. We still patrolled out there, searching for enemy activity, but no one was getting shot at and no one saw anything. Blue complained that it was almost too quiet. Some of the guys were getting jittery about it. Mighty Morris said he could almost hear Van Heflin or Victor Mature in some jungle movie muttering after the native drums stopped beating, “Quiet. Yeah, too quiet.” One of the problems with being a snuffy in war was that you rarely saw the “Big Picture.” You knew only what was happening in your immediate vicinity. As far as you were concerned, there wasn’t even a war if you weren’t personally being shot at, while a few miles away other guys might be fighting for their lives on isolated FSBs.
The days were hot and muggy and dirty. I got diarrhea because of the malaria pills and had to be grounded to the ash can crappers for a few days. Chow wasn’t too bad. Mostly it was D-rations heated up in the mess hall. Ds were like Cs, only more of them in bigger cans. Now and then somebody made a supply run to Vung Tau or Cu Chi and returned with steaks.
The volleyball game was the cultural center of Apache Troop. It continued day after day. The same game, it seemed, as though it had started at the beginning of time and would still be playing when Gabriel blew his horn. Much like the poker games at Fort Wolters. Somebody had built a private bunker next to the court out of sandbags and construction steel. A Cobra jock presently lived in it. He often brought a chair out, leaned it against the side of his little residence and sipped coffee contentedly while he watched the game.
Blue explained that the bunker was for short-timers, guys who were nearing the ends of their tours. They got nervous when they got short, afraid something freakish might happen to them, like a mortar round in the bed when they only had a few weeks to go. Each guy in turn when he got ready to DEROS back to the United States auctioned the bunker off to the next paranoid short-timer with the highest bid.
On the volleyball court was where guys got acquainted. Fortunately, I had learned long ago as the shortest kid in high school not to be sensitive about my size. The guys were going to be on you about something, even if you had a harelip. That was the way it was. All the old “short” jokes were brought out, dusted off and spiked into my hip pocket. My radio call sign was “Blue Apache Three-Seven.” The others changed that to “Squatty Body Three-Seven.”
Mighty Morris wrote his songs and played them in the O Club.
“He stood in the steeple,
and pissed on the people;
But the people
couldn’t piss on him. . . .”
Beer cans flew in the O Club like mortar rounds. In the middle of a session, Mighty Morris stood up and lamented, “I’m so damned bored. If I knew I was going to be killed before I got out of this shitbag country, I’d just as soon it be now to get it over with rather than put up with all the bullshit and waiting.”
I had no complaints. I liked it boring. I kept busy hauling ass and trash, conducting low-risk troop and LRRP insertions and extractions, and growing a mustache. I flew mostly with Blue Beatty, but sometimes with Warrants Mighty Morris or the lumbering Alabaman Farmer Farmer, who flew almost as clumsily as he walked. Our most exciting mission was flying two Hueys full of boisterous pilots to Phuoc Vinh, where 1st Cav had moved its division headquarters, for a squadron hail-and-farewell party. Hail to new arrivals like me, farewell to departing vets.
I wore my new expensive black Stetson cavalry hat with the gold braid and my new mustache. The mustache was a pitiful, mangy thing compared to some of the others, whose waxed ends were perfectly capable of stabbing you to death if you got too close. Everybody got drunk except the “designated drivers.” It was a singing, laughing, boisterous, quarrelsome bunch of chopper jocks and crews who returned to Tay Ninh late at night. The chopper cargo doors were closed to keep us from falling out. Major Calhoun demanded to know who left a booby-trapped bottle of piss at the entrance to the mess hall. Nobody confessed.
“That’s all right,” he said. “You had what piss was left in the bottle with your breakfast oatmeal.”
Alexander, I told myself, you are one lucky little bastard, all in all. Flying over Vietnam, I looked down and saw that it looked very big and glowed very green with its thick covering of jungle, spotted darker here and there from clouds passing by. It was a great place for a guerrilla war if you were the guerrilla. But here I was, high and safe in the sky. Nobody was shooting at me, and I was perfectly happy to be up above it all rather than down inside it directing artillery fire missions.
There was a big air horn on top of the TOC at base camp. It sounded whenever there was an emergency that required our services, like a ship going down or a Blue platoon getting caught in deep kimchi. I kept expecting it to go off, but it remained as mute and aloof as a bleached blonde at a bar before midnight.
I was one lucky bastard. War wasn’t nearly as bad as I expected it to be. At least my war wasn’t.