I turned around once in the quiet and peace of altitude on the way back to Tay Ninh and looked into the cargo bay at the dead men. It was an image I would carry with me forever.
Shaky stood long-legged, leaning forward against his monkey line in the open door with his back to the carnage, as though distancing himself from it. Slipstream whistled past. Sergeant Snider sat cross-legged on the blood-smeared deck with the battered and bloodied head of his wounded teammate cradled in his lap. Blood oozed from a flesh wound in his upper arm. He stared wearily out the door past Shaky, his face flat and drawn and looking so old as to have gone beyond time. Like he too was attempting to separate himself from all that surrounded him.
The second live trooper appeared unscathed but exhausted. He lay belly down on the steel deck, too spent to move, his head turned toward the open door. He still clutched his M16 with one hand. It was difficult to tell him from the two dead guys who lay crumpled next to him like empty sacks of flesh, one almost on top of the other. They were all covered with blood. His free hand grasped the boot of one of the dead guys as though to prevent him from vibrating out. It was a tender and haunting gesture to see.
A thick puddle of blood seeped out of all that mangled humanity, pooled on the steel-riveted deck and quivered and throbbed from the vibration. I turned away quickly and concentrated on the green sweep of earth creeping past underneath and the wide stretch of sky above. I still smelled the rich, metallic odor of warm blood mixed with the acrid stench of cordite.
It was great to still be alive. That thought raced through my mind again and again. I felt bad about the dead guys, but wasn’t it great that I was still alive? I felt vaguely guilty, but I couldn’t help it. If somebody had to get it, wasn’t it better that it was someone else rather than me? At least we got three of them out alive.
The odor of death stayed with me, cloying in my throat. Most people under normal circumstances failed to realize that blood had an odor. You didn’t smell it when you cut yourself shaving. But when there was so much of it, pouring out all over everything, it had a primordial stink that seeped into your soul and memory banks and remained there forever.
It oozed into crevices and cracks in the helicopter. It took us weeks to get it all out. It dried and returned at unexpected times as a thin pink powder vibrating throughout the ship, triggering the sights and sounds and scents of that day. I had to glance back each time it happened to assure myself that the dead guys weren’t still crumpled on the deck. It was like their ghosts stayed in the ship.
Blue still hadn’t put on his helmet or fastened his seat belts, we had departed the PZ in such a hurry. Neither had I. He looked at me, his face pale and his wonderful mustache looking drooped. This guy had balls to drop a chopper in that hole.
“You got it?” It was a question.
He needed a break. I took a deep breath. Through the radios I heard the Snakes working out, mopping up what was left. “Breaking right. . .breaking left. . .coming in hot. . .”
“I got it,” I said, and I flew it the rest of the way in.
LRRPs had had a bunch of wooden nickels made up somewhere which they gave to chopper crews that pulled them out of fires. They always made a big production of handing them out. It became a status thing among airmen to possess a pocketful of them. We may even have taken chances for wooden nickels that we would not have risked otherwise. It was sort of like what Napoleon said of ribbons: “If I had enough ribbon, I could conquer the world.”
Blue, Shaky, and I were all recommended for medals. I eventually received my first Bronze Star with “V” for valor, but I placed a lot more value on the wooden nickel Sergeant Snider pressed into my palm after we reached Tay Ninh. There were tears in his eyes. The Bronze Star came from the impersonal bowels of the Department of Defense; that wooden nickel came from the heart.
Like Blue said at the O Club, “Hell, don’t give me another goddamned medal. Give me a beer.”
The action provided some nice stats for the brass. Twenty “confirmed kills” went up on the TOC’s Vulture Board.
“How many did you kill with the blooper?” Sergeant Major Rogers asked me.
“How the hell should I know? I was too scared to notice. I was just shooting.”
“Three,” Blue said.
I looked at him. He shrugged.
“He killed three. That’s confirmed.”
“It is?” I said.
“What difference does it make?” Blue asked. “It doesn’t mean anything. The brass add up all the numbers to claim we’re winning the war.”
The most amazing thing was that there was not a single bullet hole in our helicopter. Farmer Farmer and Miles landed directly behind us at Tay Ninh. Shaky was looking for bullet holes that might cause structural or mechanical damage while the dead and wounded were being loaded into a truck ambulance for transportation to the hospital and morgue. He stepped back in amazement.
The other pilots looked the ship over, even getting down on their knees and peering underneath. Blue and I checked it out.
“How in pea-picking hell did you manage that trick?” Farmer Farmer demanded. “From where we sat, it looked like you guys were flying into a spiderweb of green tracers. My Gawd!”
What could we say? That the gooks were bad shots?