The Phantom Blooper (24 page)

The first thing I learned about life in a Viet Cong tunnel was that Viet Cong tunnels were not constructed for tall people. I crawl a few yards, then squat and push my back hard against the earth wall. I can't see my hand in front of my face. I can't breathe. Mud has sucked my rubber sandals off and now is closing in cold and wet over my toes. A spiderweb catches me in the face. I spit. Furry lumps splash in water. I hear rats clawing for high ground.

The wall against my back reverberates. Moist soil falls down all over me. I spit again. I cough. There is dirt in my eyes. I press my ear against the cold tunnel wall and I can hear the battle, big thumps, rhythmic strings of impacting raindrops, and, as clear as any field radio, the rumble of tanks.

And I think:
They are going to blow the tunnel, they are going to blow the tunnel, I just know that they are going to blow it
. Some dumb grunt is standing up there popping a Willy Peter grenade. The Willy Peter grenade is a light green canister with a yellow stripe. I hear it.
There, that's the spoon flying off.
The grunt is going to drop the Willy Peter grenade into the tunnel and fry me like Spam. Then the tunnel rats will come down and be scared and amazed when they find me.

I panic. I hear more rats. I think I hear boots topside. I feel something slimy trying to crawl up my leg. My test drive of a grave has inspired me with a sudden will to live. I push, pull, heave, climb, and claw my way up out of the tunnel.

Back out in the light, I rest on my stomach, pumping air, cold and wet, plastered with mud, dead leaves, and sweat.

Somewhere a water buffalo bellows horrible death agonies.

When I stand up, I see a world of shit coming down.

In the rice paddy water the reflection of a prehistoric flying monster grows larger and larger at a fantastic rate until it turns into a Cobra gunship and roars in at one hundred miles per hour, shaking the canopy over the
Luu Dan
factory with a hot blast of wind and sand. Miniguns are chopping away
chug-chug-chug
and the Cobra fires hissing rockets with long tails of smoke. The rockets look like white snakes with heads of fire.

The Broom-Maker runs past the
Luu Dan
factory, her clothes charred and smoking. She runs steadily and with intense concentration, ignores me, ignores and is perhaps unaware of the fact that both of her hands have been blown off and blood is pumping out of the shredded flesh of her wrists.

The Cobras swing around and roar in for another gun-run. Bullets blast the hooches to pieces. There is red fire on the thatched roofs and black smoke beyond the fire.

I turn to face the tanks.

The tanks are bulky mud-splattered monsters, attacking on line through the rice fields, crushing through the paddy dikes with no effort at all, grinding the rice into heavy crunching treads and destroying the crop, plowing deep into the paddies like bloated iron hogs grunting in the mud.

Small-arms fire cranks up to full volume on the far side of the village, recon by fire, right on cue, and I know it's a ground attack. The popping of AKs begins to mingle with the
whack-whack
of M-16s.

Johnny Be Cool reappears, picks up an Easter basket full of red metal eggs from the end of the
Luu Dan
factory assembly line.

A tank with CONG AU-GO-GO painted in big Day-Glo letters on the turret growls up and stops twenty yards away. Painted on the tank hull is a squad of little yellow men in conical hats, neatly X'd out.

Behind the tank, enemy infantry is coming in on line and in force.

The grunts are wearing new jungle utilities, new canvas jungle boots, new web gear, new everything. They are legs, line doggies, Army pukes. It's as easy to tell Army grunts from field Marines as it is to tell a bag lady from a Paris model.

From behind a burning waterwheel a squad of Army grunts charges my position at high port. The squad sets up a perimeter protecting the tank while the Tank Commander gives them covering fire with the .50-caliber machine gun on top of the tank.

"
BAN! BAN!
" yells Commander Be Dan, and suddenly I am no longer alone in my heroic one-man unarmed defense of the
Luu Dan
factory.

Commander Be Dan yells in English: "Airborne armymen, airborne armymen, fuck you."

As the Army grunts exchange fire with the village Self-Defense Militia I crawl out of the way of some bullets and take cover behind a dead water bo.

The firefight gets hotter. Johnny Be Cool takes a grenade from the Easter basket, pulls the tin cap from the end of the bamboo handle, hooks his thumb into the comm wire pull ring, and throws, as hard as he can.

The grenade arcs out, string unraveling until it is taut and jerks a sparking pin from the grenade. Friction ignites the firing mechanism. After a couple of more seconds in flight the grenade explodes.

Johnny Be Cool throws homemade hand grenades, one after the other, by the numbers. About half of the grenades are duds.

The noise level gets scary and black powder smoke floats across the battlefield like ground fog. The stubby barrels of black M-16s spit sparks of gold fire as Johnny Be Cool throws hand grenades at the tank.

I peek over the warm carcass of the dead water bo. The tank looks undamaged.

I see a grunt. The grunt is trying to pull himself up by clawing at the steel treads of the tank, but he can't stand up. He looks down, then screams at the sight of his thigh bones jammed into the earth like white stakes.

Johnny Be Cool cocks his arm to throw his last grenade.

Bullets tattooing the air over my head and rocking the water bo carcass tell me it's time to change my position. As I stand up something hits me a glancing blow on the side of the head. I fall backward. The sky above me is filled with the black tumble of grenades. I watch the lazy flight of the smooth green ovals. Somebody is sowing hard noisy seeds of kiss-your-ass-goodbye.

Concussion sucks all the blood out of my face while a stone elephant sits down onto my head and black noise embeds hundreds of fragments of steel wire into my living flesh.

People are yelling at one another all around me. I don't know what's going on.

Somebody screams, "GUNS UP!" Then: "MEDIC UP!" Then: "PONCHO UP!"

Two brown balloons are having an argument right above my face. The argument is about some guy who is maybe dead or maybe not dead. I think maybe it's me.

They roll me onto a poncho and lift me up. They carry me into the village while I bounce around like a rag doll and wonder if I'm alive.

By the time we reach the village common, which is being used as a landing zone for the medevac choppers, I'm feeling better. That is, I'm feeling alive enough to be in pain. My face is throbbing like it has been string by yellow jacket wasps and I've got blood coming out of my nose and ears.

The brown balloons drop me onto the deck next to a platoon of wounded grunts.

Ten yards away, a big Sergeant, a white giant with a steel-gray crew cut and a bomb-shaped head, drags Johnny Be Cool kicking and screaming out of a drainage ditch by his ankles, and drops him on the deck. Somebody gives Johnny Be Cool a vertical butt-stroke to the head with a shotgun. Thirty yards away I can hear the
crack
of Johnny Be Cool's neck.

The big Sergeant bends down and lifts Johnny Be Cool's body, with both hands, the way you might pick up a seabag, and carries it to the edge of the common and throws it down a well.

Surrounded by chaos, I stand up. Some bad poison washes through my body. I stumble like a drunk, looking for a weapon.

I find an enemy KIA and I take his weapon, an M-79 grenade launcher. I stumble on, looking for a target.

A Charlie-Charlie, a command chopper, blasts sand into a cloud that obscures the battle. Flat round winnowing baskets fly through the air like bronze coins. The chopper looms in the sky directly above me, hovering so close I can almost reach out and touch it, if I could lift my arms. Squinting into the tornado of prop wash I see stenciled across the belly of the chopper: a white skull and YOU HAVE JUST BEEN KILLED COURTESY OF THE 107TH ARMORED CAVALRY--THE BUCKEYE BOYS--GHOST RIDERS IN THE SKY.

The Charlie-Charlie rolls away, a bird of prey looking for enemy gooks to kill, and I use all of my strength to lift the M-79 grenade launcher.

I fire.
Bloop
. It is the first time in over a hundred years that a member of my family has fired upon federal troops.

The blooper grenade blows off the chopper's tail rotor and the Charlie-Charlie drops, crashing down into a hooch.

As the Charlie-Charlie goes down, I faint.

The next thing I know, I'm crawling on my hands and knees, looking for another weapon. The blooper holds only one round and I forgot to get any ammunition.

I see an Arvin officer wringing the neck of the Woodcutter's little red and gold rooster. The Arvin inserts the chicken's head under his belt. As the Arvin walks away the dead chicken bounces against his thigh.

Army snuffies who don't look old enough to ride a bicycle are on an important resource-denial mission. They stand on line and piss on patched gunnysacks full of rice they have dragged out of tunnels with meat hooks.

I see five Arvin puppet armymen hiding behind a booch. The Arvins are putting battle dressings onto themselves so that they can be medevaced out of the fighting.

Bo Doi Bac Si has been captured by Army grunts. A red-faced potbellied Top Sergeant is hitting Bo Doi Bac Si upside his head. Bo Doi Bac Si does not flinch, but glares back in defiance, holds his head high, and every time they ask him a question, he spits. They hit him in the mouth. He spits blood at them.

I call out to Bo Doi Bac Si, but my words get lost somewhere in the air inside my chest.

Arvin puppet troops wander casually through the horror circus like Huckleberry Finns playing hooky from school and looking for a place to fish.

They've hanged Song. With a strand of barbed wire they've hanged Song from the giant banana tree. Her neck is broken. Her tongue protrudes from her mouth, black and grotesque.

Three baby-faced kids in olive-drab green stand on the hood of the old French armored car and poke at Song's bruised thighs with the barrels of their M-16s. If not for the war these guys would still be standing outside some small-town pool hall saying, "Aw, my ass," to each other just loud enough to be overheard by passing high school girls.

The baby-faced grunts laugh wildly as one of them takes out his shiny chrome Zippo lighter and sets fire to Song's pubic hair. Her body twitches, her fingers flutter. The kids laugh. "She's got ghosts in her!"

I should feel sad, but I don't. I don't feel anything. All I can think about is that I wish my face didn't hurt so much, and I think that if I'm going to die, why can't I just fucking die and be done with it. Why do I have to do all of this bleeding and see this Mickey Mouse murder exhibition?

I try to take one more step, just one more step. But I don't. I collapse. I lie on my back on the ground and I wait for the great shadow to move across my face.

A cheerful medic in a skuzzy boonie hat kneels down and whips out a morphine Syrette. The medic slaps the crook of my arm to find a vein. He tries to give me an injection of morphine. But his hand is shaking so hard he can't get the needle in. I reach over and hold his arm steady while he gives me the shot. I say, "Cancel the ambulance. I think it's only a hard-on."

The little medic laughs.

As I start turning into white rubber, the medic puts Band-Aids on my wounds. This strikes me as a little odd.

Somebody says, "L-T, Mortar Magnet is playing medic again." The voice shoves Mortar Magnet away from me and says, "Shit. Get away from that man, head case."

Another voice says, "Mortar Magnet, you are hereby transferred to the military police."

"Yes, L-T. "

"Arrest yourself. Get your crazy ass over to that little hooch and help rig that Chi-Com gear for demo."

"Yes, L-T. "

A big black medic with an easy grin pats me on the shoulder and says, "Be cool, m'man. You are safe and sound. It been some cold shit being held prisoner by these Charlie Congs, but you with righteous American dudes now. We here to help you. We been humping all over this A-O looking for you. Birds are inbound. You be out of this ville on a dustoff quicker than a gook can shit rice."

A voice says, "Move it, people."

A skinhead Lieutenant leans down and looks at my face. He's a pudgy little guy, another wild-eyed butter-bar bucking for tracks. His hair is red and cut high and tight. The Lieutenant says, "Is that him?"

"Shit, L-T," says the black medic, "I guess it must be him!"

Scattered small-arms fire erupts somewhere far away. Commander Be Dan and the fighters must have hit a blocking force.

I cough. I spit up some vomit. I look at it to make sure it's nothing worse than vomit.

The Army Lieutenant's face comes down, a freckled white balloon blotting out the sun. "Hang tough, trooper," he says. "Don't sweat the small shit. We'll get the gooks for you. Payback is a motherfucker. Just don't you worry." He pats my arm. "You're what this is all about."

I must be giving the Army Lieutenant a funny look because he savs, "Bird Dog overflight spotted you in a rice paddy. One round-eye on the ground. The Word came down. Extract all friendly personnel. Then kill everybody and let God sort them out."

"Sir?"

"Yes?"

"I'm not a fucking soldier."

The Lieutenant's face does not change expression. "What? What did you say?"

"I'm not a fucking Army puke. I'm a United States Marine. Retired." I clear my throat with a grunt. "Davis, James T., Private E-1, serial number 2306777." I take a deep breath and say in Vietnamese: "
Do Me Hoa Chanh.
" Then in English: "I don't surrender. Fuck you."

A grunt walks by with a severed head tied by the hair to the barrel of his M-16. It's one of the Phuong twins.

The Lieutenant looks at me without changing his expression. He says to the black medic, "Get him onto a dustoff, Doc. "