Statistically, you were more apt to get killed during your first sixty days in combat than during the rest of your year’s tour. You went through three separate phases. To begin with, there was the FNG phase when you were so green you didn’t know what was going on and you were most likely to get creamed; during the middle period, you did your job, did your time, and tried not to think much about anything else; and then came the last phase when you were a short-timer. That was when you got cautious and paranoid. You no longer chuckled over the short-timers making their bids on the private bunker at the volleyball courts; you even thought of making a bid yourself. No one wanted to be the last GI killed in Vietnam, especially for the hazy principles of a war that everybody, including politicians, was abandoning.
I saw Captain Beatty, Mr. Miles, Shaky, Mississippi, and the others transition from the go-get-’em middle stages to near-paranoia, even though they tried to hide it. Pressure started to build up about ninety days or so before DEROS, then grew into a big head of steam when you were down to about thirty days. Guys woke up in the middle of the night with nightmares, screaming.
Bird Dog in the White Platoon had been one of the biggest jokers in the Headhunters. He was, as Mighty Morris put it, “First in mischief, first in grabass, and first to fart in a helicopter.” He was a happy-go-lucky kid from Idaho and remained that way through three times being shot down in his Loach. But then he became a short-timer with sixty days left before his DEROS. He started getting shaky. He came in from a mission and the first thing he did, even if he hadn’t been shot at that day, was head for the O Club. His entire attitude changed. He became a withdrawn loner drinking by himself in the club, starting at every little sound, gazing out into space with that thousand-yard stare that said, psychologically, you were about to break. Apache Troop CO Major Powdrill asked me to take him into lifts for ass-and-trash missions and to transfer one of my middle-phasers over to Loaches. Meeker took his place in Whites.
Ass-and-trash—maintenance flights to Cu Chi, beer runs to Vung Tau, and the like—was looked upon as a turning point in your personal war and signified that it was all over except for the hail-and-farewell bash. Whenever I could, I pulled my men out of combat when they were down to within thirty days of going home and assigned them nothing but ass-and-trash. That meant the rest of us doubled up on the hairy missions, but nobody complained. We had our own short-timer grace period to look forward to.
But until that final month, you had to pull your own cultivator, as Farmer Farmer put it. We always had more combat missions to run than I had men or machines to run them with. Of the eight helicopters assigned to my platoon, two or three were almost always down for maintenance or combat damage. Of my sixteen pilots, I couldn’t afford to have more than two or three down for combat damage themselves.
“Whew! I made it again. One more day,” Mighty Morris exclaimed each time he returned from out there, our hunting grounds.
He faithfully maintained his short-timer countdown calendar. By the time he was down to forty-nine days, he became concerned over why his rotation orders had not come. Normally, you received them about sixty days in advance.
“Them hillbillies in Army Personnel have done lost your orders,” Farmer Farmer ribbed him. “The Pentagon wants you to do another tour ‘cause you done cleaned so many gooks’ plows this time over.”
“Damnit, Farmer, stop being country,” Rouse scolded. “How do you clean a gook’s plow when all he’s got is a rice stick and a buffalo and a wife to pull it?”
“See what you can do, Cap’n Mini-Man,” Mr. Morris pleaded, taking me aside. “I’m having my mother contact our senator about it. They have forgot me and lost my orders.”
The more beers Mighty Morris drank, the more mournful his song at the O Club.
“If I die in ol’ Vietnam,
Please write a letter to my mom;
Tell her I died with a grin,
Bringing smoke on Ho Chi Minh. . . .”
Farmer Farmer and Swede and a couple of other jocks pulled chairs around a table into which a couple of generations of pilots had carved pithy sayings such as Fuck Charles. At first, there were the usual rowdy exchange of stories. Swede had shot up a “VC truck,” which was his term for water buffalo, and chased its owner across a rice field. Conrad and Bijorian buzzed a bunch of nude Vietnamese girls bathing in the river and shot at a VC peeping torn hiding in the bushes ogling the girls. They used their handguns, getting in some target practice, leaning out the Huey’s windows and banging away at the crazy scared gook until he reached the jungle.
“We missed that cocksucker every round,” Conrad said, laughing. “It was his lucky day.”
Somewhere during the evening, the conversation turned more weighty. It began when Mighty Morris laid aside his guitar and joined us at the table.
“The VC are still winning because we’re losing,” he said. As a short-timer, he wasn’t nearly as much fun as he used to be.
Big Swede glared at him. “What the fuck you talking about, Morris?”
“Oh, we’re kicking ass on the VC and NVA all right, but the people are taking the beating. That’s why we’re losing. These poor dinks are born, grow up, and die in the same cruddy little ville.”
“Something like Farmer Farmer,” Gerard said to lighten the mood. It didn’t work.
Mighty Morris continued. “Hell, they don’t own nothing except a grass or rock hut, a couple of pigs, a dog, a water buffalo, some chickens and geese, a vegetable garden and a rice field—”
“Look around,” Gerard challenged, still trying. “It’s more than we own.”
“—They see us flying over, us Americans up there with all our God-like power. So we come down from time to time and smite their water buffalo, tramp through their vegetable gardens, scare their daughters and blow up their hooches. We’re really winning hearts and minds, aren’t we?”
“Ol’ Charlie does worse than that,” Swede pointed out. “VC come in and butcher their chickens and take half their crops for taxes. They hang the village chief up by his heels and cut out his guts as an example not to cooperate with the Americans.”
“True. But Charlie is one of them and not a foreigner. Besides, they’re politicians who do that and everybody knows politicians are scumbags. You expect them to take your rice and butcher your geese. That’s what politicians do.”
Swede shook his head and gazed into his beer. Gerard got up for another suds. Farmer Farmer, who hadn’t fucked up a helicopter in more than a month, said, “Morris, you’re getting a short-timer’s attitude.”
“I ain’t getting. I already got.” He looked around the table. “The best thing could happen to any of us,” he said, “is the same thing that happened to shitbird Captain Williams from West Point. Remember him? The best thing could happen to any of us is a minor bone wound.”
Conrad winced. “Fuck. I heard he lost his whole fucking leg. Maybe they’ll call off the war first for lack of interest.”
“I’m serious as a dead pilot,” Morris went on. “Tell ’em, Cap’n. You’re our next short-timer.”
Swede snorted. “Mini-Man has always been a short timer. When are you leaving, Cap’n? When’s your DEROS?”
“They’ll have to run me out of Vietnam,” I joked. “I eat this shit up.”
“Think about it, Cap’n Alexander,” Mighty Morris persisted. “You can’t keep doing what you’re doing and not finally get hit. It’s gonna happen sooner or later. Best thing for you when it happens is you get a bone wound in the hand or foot or arm. You’re out of here just like that.” He snapped his fingers.
I was already getting paranoid over this charmed shit anyhow. I even took the C-4 out from underneath my seat and started eating my C-rats cold. One thing you didn’t need in a helicopter was an ejection seat if a round happened to hit the explosives. I still stood my rotation like everyone else, ran more missions than I asked of any of my men, but I also thought things through more carefully than I had before.
The law of averages was bound to catch up to Mini-Man one of these days. Sooner or later I was going to take a round that would dump me in the jungle with Charlie and the snakes. Lately, I had started having more and more nightmares. Sometimes when it rained at night I sat up suddenly so soaked with anxiety sweat that I thought the roof was leaking. It was astounding for me at this phase to think that I had once, in the middle phase, considered extending my tour. That I had actually enjoyed being hero of the oppressed and champion of truth, justice, and the American Way.
I lay in my bunk later that night and stared up into the darkness, thinking about the different changes I had gone through. Mighty Morris was twisting and flopping in bed, having nightmares. A barrage of H&I artillery shuddered the bunkhouse. Big parachute flares with a lot of candlepower lit up the entire world. The barracks screens glowed like dying fluorescent bulbs, casting shadows. Shadows oozed through the room like hooded ghouls, tiptoeing over sleeping men and appearing, disappearing, and reappearing like dark ghosts in a graveyard. Jesus, was I flipping out or what?
After nearly a year listening to artillery, sleeping as we were right next to it, I had long ago learned to distinguish between incoming and outgoing rounds. I heard a high-pitched whine that grew rapidly louder until I thought I would explode first. I sprang out of bed.
“Incoming-g-g-g-g-g!”
Mighty Morris heard it in his sleep. He had recently come to believe the enemy was out to get him personally. He was the first out the door and into the bomb shelter pipe. He crouched in the very dark center of it. I hunkered next to him while a few mortar rounds crumped! and cracked! around the base. The enemy’s version of H&I.
There was something about cowering in the darkness like a rat in a sewer that bred all kinds of negative thoughts and feelings. It occurred to me suddenly and inexplicably that sometime between now and my DEROS in February, I was going to get it. Shot down out there and tortured to death, or perhaps a mortar shell or a rocket landing in my bunk, or maybe a stray bullet through my Mini-Man helmet. . . Charlie was out there every day like we were, hunting heads of his own, putting tick marks on his version of the Vulture Board. B-I-L-B-Y.