Apache Troop and all its facilities were located near the more narrow tip of the air base’s north end. The only things standing between Charlie and us, our barracks and mess hall and oil drum crappers, were a pair of 175mm cannon, two eight-inch guns, some 40mm antiaircraft pom-pom guns, a forty-foot-thick tangle of concertina wire laced with Claymores, trip flares and tin cans, and a width of about two hundred yards of cleared fields of fire. With all that, it wouldn’t seem to matter that Headhunter pilots slept almost next to the perimeter’s green line; it would appear that we were fairly secure. After all, it would have taken a White Sox prospect to hurl a satchel charge into the camp; it would require a bunch of the little motherfuckers to overrun us. Still, I remembered Minh the sapper at An Khe, who sneaked up crawling through the wire without anyone seeing him until he tossed a satchel full of potential death into the midst of us wide-eyed FNGs.
All that artillery on base firing H&I almost every night should have been reassuring. Instead, sometimes, you got to hate it. It was tough trying to sleep with your bunk doing a Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly across the floor. If you turned on your bunk light and tried to read, air vibrations seemed to jar the words on the page into a scrambling mass of tiny cockroaches. I stuffed cotton or plugs into my ears and lay on my bunk in the dark behind the mosquito netting and watched the artillery flicker in the dark all around, like heat lightning preceding a storm.
So what if the poor grunts out there were sleeping in the rain, eating cold, greasy Cs mixed with rainwater and were scared to death because the only thing between them and Charlie were their M16 rifles. You had to fight your own war. You couldn’t fight everybody else’s. Everything was relative.
“Psssst! Mini-Man, you awake?”
“Wanna make a run to the O Club to wet our whistles?”
“I’d rather make a run to Tulsa. But, yeah, let’s go. They’re gonna keep this shit up anyhow until Apache Sunrise.”
Headhunters didn’t have to settle for bleacher seats whenever there was stuff going on outside the wire. We had box seats, reserved, on the fifty-yard line. If there was a really big shoo, as Ed Sullivan put it, with guest performances by Spooky or Puff the Magic Dragon, we took our beers out on the chopper line and stood on top of the berms to smoke and joke and grab ass and cheer at appropriate times. The show was better than the Aurora Borealis, the Northern Lights, more spectacular than Fourth of July over the Potomac. Spooky and Puff were either AC-130 or AC-47 airplanes heavily armed with 20mm Vulcans, 7.62 miniguns, .50-cal machine guns, and even 105mm howitzers. Streams of red fire, like laser beams in the night, connected the battle planes in the air to the poor bastards down on the ground getting hosed. We made comments and jokes about the dinks getting fried and turned into crispy critters.
“Smell it! Just smell it!” Miles challenged. “There ain’t no smell like the sweet scent of well-done gook.”
“There ain’t?” Mighty Morris countered. “What’s die matter with you, Miles? You stupid? Ain’t you never smelled pussy before?”
“I ain’t never smelled it well-done.”
“I know for a fact you’ve smelled it ripe, which is worse than well-done. I saw that cunt you were with in Tay Ninh. I smelled her as soon as I hit city limits.”
“You smelled your own mustache, Morris.”
Tay Ninh the base and the 1/9 Cavalry were the major obstacles preventing the enemy from marching on Saigon. In spite of the guns and wire and Claymores, Spooky and Puff and foot patrols and air strikes, in spite of it all, nothing kept Charlie from at least trying us, if for no other reason than to prove he was out there watching and waiting.
It ruined your whole night when Charlie decided to flex his muscles and awakened you with mortar shells going Crump! Crump! Crump! up and down the base. I envied the guy in his private bunker at the volleyball court who could just turn over and go back to sleep. I shot straight up in bed. Mighty Morris was already halfway to the door, carrying his guitar, while I was still fighting to extricate myself from the mosquito net.
“Better get your charmed mini-ass to the bunkers, Alexander!” he shouted as the screen door slammed behind him.
Pilots and crew in various stages of undress raced for the big culvert pipes buried in their berms of earth and sandbags. We scrambled into the open ends like mice seeking the nearest hole after being dusted out of an old mattress. An explosion thumped behind me, close, showering me with rock and gravel and dirt. I scrabbled into the pipe on hands and bare knees and didn’t stop scrabbling until I reached as near the center of the pipe as I could.
About a dozen half-naked GIs were already inside. Mess cooks, clerks, pilots, crews . . . You couldn’t stand up in the pipe, it was too low. Even for me. I flopped over onto my butt, drew my bare knees up to my chin, wrapped my arms around my shanks and tried to make the smallest target possible. Being small had certain advantages.
The crumpling continued at spaced intervals outside. Explosions flickered in the open ends of the pipe. The enemy seldom had enough spare shells to really carpet a target.
Cowering in the pipe reminded me of hiding from a tornado in a storm cellar in Oklahoma and Texas. It carried with it that same sense of waiting and expectation; of anxiousness that, while you might be all right in the cellar, what was the funnel doing to your home and to your neighbors and their homes?
Sergeant Major Rogers was one of the last men to seek cover. It was dark in the pipe, but I recognized his voice and his hulking Neanderthal silhouette framed against the flickering open end of the shelter. His breathing was raspy, excited.
“We got gooks in the wire!” he announced.
Oh, shit! Talk about elevating the pucker factor. I eyed the open end of the pipe, half expecting to see some vicious little bitty guy about my size pop up and yell Banzai! or whatever the hell it was the Vietnamese used for a war cry. I unexpectedly understood how it felt to be trapped in the Titanic when it went down.
“Anybody got a weapon?” a shrill voice demanded.
No one did. We were clerks and jerks and cooks and flyers. I thought about the M79 blooper behind the seat in my chopper. If I made a run for it, we could at least put up some fight. It was better than cowering in here waiting for a slant-eye to toss a bag full of Boom! in on top of us.
“Don’t you think we ought to find weapons and put up a defense?” I asked of no one in particular.
Two things dissuaded me from leaving the pipe on that errand. First, a nearby explosion; Charlie would be trying for the helicopters, his primary target. Second, Sergeant Major Rogers had got his wind back.
He growled, “I said gooks were in the wire, not through the wire. Our grunts know what to do. Let them handle their job. The best thing we can do to help is just stay out of their way.”
Bursts of small arms fire erupted out there somewhere on the line. If I sometimes felt vulnerable and exposed in the air, it was nothing like the feeling of helplessness I now experienced. I was so damned glad I gave up artillery for aviation.
Someone murmured a chant in the darkness: “Oh, shit! Oh, shit! Oh, shit!”
My sentiments exactly.
Any attack on a major installation automatically summoned the Air Force. All hell broke loose as fast movers screamed in overhead and dumped their bombs. Everything was going at once. The 175s were pounding. The forty mike-mike pompoms had two speeds, a slow speed and a slower speed: K-thunk! . . .K-thunk! . . .K-thunk! . . . C-130s overhead kicked out huge parachute flares that lit up the entire world like miniature greenish suns. Cobras took to the air with their 3.5 rockets armed. Because of the accuracy of their weapons, they could get in close and dirty on the enemy and prevent his closing with us.
Where do you want these rockets?
Five feet in front of us. Can you see where I’m pointing? That’s where I want ’em.
We huddled together in the darkness of the culvert pipe, listening. I didn’t realize Captain Beatty was inside until he flicked on his flashlight. He calmly groomed his magnificent mustache with one hand; he must have been sleeping and mussed it. Then he opened a newspaper on his knees and began reading by the light beam held in his free hand. Everyone stared at him.
“It says in the newspaper,” he began reflectively, “and I quote, ‘The Woodstock generation is staging an antiwar moratorium in Washington.’ It says here the war is ‘corrupt, immoral, and feeds the American arms industry.’”
“Well, fuck ’em and the black horse they rode in on,” Farmer Farmer snorted. “Their asses ain’t out here getting shot at. As far as this ol’ southern boy is concerned, I’d just as soon waste an antiwar hippie as shoot a gook or eat turnip greens.”
That produced a titter of laughter. Tension immediately dissolved. A big discussion soon started in which almost everyone sided against the draft-dodging protesters and politicians who refused to let GIs win the war. Everyone had his own opinion on what should be done with the dope-smoking hippies, starting with castration. I worked my way down to Blue.
“Can I look at the Sports section?” I asked.
He grinned at me.
The probe on the wire lasted only a short time. Soon, a stillness descended upon the base like the aftermath of a storm. We ventured cautiously out of the pipe. A single parachute flare remained stuck in the sky, blocking out the stars with its bright light. We began checking for damage, looking a little stunned as people do who have survived a storm.
“Lieutenant Alexander?” someone said.
“They blew all the windows out of your Huey.”
From the looks of the flight line, it appeared mortars had walked down one side of the line and up the other. Three out of our eight slicks were damaged, one of which looked totaled beyond salvage. It would have to be cannibalized for parts. A Loach was also destroyed and three Cobras busted up. Maintenance had to start work immediately if the Headhunters were going to stay in business.
My chopper was out of commission temporarily. Shrapnel ate holes in its one side while the concussion of an exploding round shattered the Plexiglas windshield. Shaky came and stood beside me.
“It’s all right, sir,” he commiserated. “It don’t count if it gets shot when you’re not in it. Mini-Man is still charmed.”