The Phantom Blooper (25 page)

A radioman appears. The radioman is wearing a big floppy straw hat. He says, "L-T, you want gunships? And the Sergeant Major wants you ASAP. He says he's got a mutiny situation in Third Platoon."

Still looking at me, the Lieutenant says, "Negative gunships. Roger the Sergeant Major." He suddenly turns away and shouts: "Police up that gear, trooper. Corporal, where is that personnel damage assessment? Get me a body count of these Oriental human beings. And have some of your people check out those enemy structures, then blow them."

The Lieutenant walks away, saying to somebody, "That's affirmative. Put your ordnance over there."

Soldiers are pulling muddy weapons and military equipment out of tunnels. An angry grunt with a red face is furiously bayoneting a bamboo canteen, grunting with satisfaction after each vicious thrust.

I'm lifted up and carried through a cloud of grape smoke and into a storm of stinging sand thrown up the prop wash of inbound medevac choppers.

I'm put down with the wounded who are waiting to be onloaded. The medics are slashing gear from the wounded with knives. The medics cut off my black pajamas. They leave me naked, but I'm allowed to keep my beat-up old Stetson.

Being wounded makes us invisible. The soldiers burning the village with torches of bamboo and straw look right through us like we're already ghosts. You're no longer a part of what's going on. You feel out of place. You wonder what's going to happen to you. Where are you going, you ask, and will it hurt? You don't like sick people and you certainly don't want to be left behind with strangers.

Medevac choppers set down, and hacking blades like motorized machetes blast pinpoints of shrapnel. The choppers load the litter cases first: head wounds, VSIs--Very Seriously Injured--and Expectants. A chopper lifts off and the down-draft from the blurred rotor blades catches blood pouring from the open belly door and prop wash splatters the litter bearers on the ground with pink mist.

Some Army grunts stroll by like they're on their way to a picnic at the beach. The soldiers laugh too loud and talk too loud. Two of the soldiers have a grip on Bo Doi Bac Si's ankles. They are dragging him away for the body count. Somebody has nailed a unit insignia patch to his forehead. A bonybrown puppy lopes along beside the body, nudging in to lick blood off of Bo Doi Bac Si's face.

A friendly medic kneels down and spreads Xylocaine ointment over my face and hands. The sun is in my eye, so I can't see him. I say, "Thanks, pal." After a few moments my face and hands get numb and go away for a little trip.

I turn my head to starboard. For ten yards, in perfectly aligned rank and file, in formation even in death, lumpy body bags full of soldiers wait with flawless patience.

I roll to port toward the sound of muted moans. Somebody has made a mistake. The only medevac priority lower than a dead American is a gutshot Vietnamese woman. Some New Guy medic who didn't know any better has brought the Fighter-Widow, the mother of B-Nam Hai, and has left her with the wounded on a bed of bloody battle dressings, thinking she'll be medevaced.

B-Nam Hai is not to be seen, but a bawling baby who is only just learning to walk waddles up to the Fighter-Widow, plops down next to her, and holds the dying woman's hand.

A skinny soldier with a freshly shaved bald head and with fat red and white battle dressings tied to both of his legs is shoving his right index finger in and out of an exit wound in the Fighter-Widow's stomach. The Fighter-Widow whimpers and whines, but not loud. There is the metallic odor of fresh blood.

Somebody laughs. A middle-aged man with eyebrows as black as raven's wings and a dimpled chin sits up. The man has combed his black hair across his head in an attempt to hide his bald spot. He looks like my high school football coach. But he doesn't look wounded, and he's got all of his gear with him.

The Coach says, "You retarded West Texas cracker son of a bitch. Murphy, I'm glad they got you, boy. I'm glad they did it to you. Your body count is a standing joke. I always said you couldn't walk point for shit." The Coach burps and feels his chest.

Murphy with the grayish-white bald head says, "Aw, leave me alone, Sarge. I'm finger-fucking a gook."

Someone laughs, but not the Coach. The Coach is falling back, spitting blood.

A passing medic dips down to the Coach for an instant and then walks on. The medic jerks a thumb over his shoulder and says to the litter bearers, "Tag him and bag him."

Somewhere someone screams, long and horrible, and you think:
That could not possibly be a human being,
and the litter bearers who are loading the wounded stand still and listen. And you can see that one of the litter bearers, a short potbellied guy loaded down with ammunition bandoliers stuffed full of battle dressings, is wetting his pants but doesn't know it yet. He listens to the scream and has a look on his face like a punji stake just pierced his foot.

A Mexican guy with a big Zapata mustache and a red
M
marked on his forehead with a laundry pencil to show that he's had morphine, rocks back and forth while his chubby round face with its square white teeth tells everybody in Mexican his newly devised deadly program of revenge because the gooks have wasted all of his friends. The medics have tied the Mexican up with rope. Between his Spanish threats he chants, rocking back and forth against the rope, "Payback is a motherfucker. Payback is a motherfucker."

As they load me onto the cavernous belly of a vibrating machine I see soldiers hammering steel rods into the ground to find tunnels for the tunnel rats. The tunnel rats are expert miners who dig for things that are where they do not belong.

The sun is going down but somewhere they've dropped a Willy Peter grenade into a tunnel and the village is lit up by white and yellow flashes of secondary explosions. The sympathetic detonations sound like a trainload of ammunition cooking off.

Army medics lift a wounded man into the chopper and lay him down next to me, talking to him all the time to reassure him, touching him gently so that he won't feel alone, but you see the look in their eyes and the look in their eyes has already pronounced him dead.

After the last of the medics have loaded the last of the body bags like very heavy laundry the medics hop off the cargo door and run into the hiss of the turbines, bent low to avoid the blurred rotor blades, turning their faces away from the sting of the prop wash.

I'm floating in a morphine haze, zoned out, and the scene that I'm a part of is moving slower and slower and at any moment will freeze and stop.

I lean back against the belly of the Chinook cargo helicopter, packed in tight among a full load of dead and wounded soldiers. It's like being inside the belly of a green aluminum whale. I cling to the red nylon webbing on the walls.

The wind howls in through the open cargo door. The wind must be freezing, but I feel warm.

As I sink into a warm sleep an Army medic sitting facing me talks into a field radio handset. He reads out the names and serial numbers of casualties. Somewhere far away, in a nice quiet office, some candy-assed pogue is already turning the sticky red blood into clean white paperwork so that it can be filed and forgotten.

The medic's voice is a flat monotone: "Ah, I say again, ah, be advised that's fourteen, I say again one four-Kilo India Alpha, and thirty-nine, that's three-niner, ah, say again, over. Negative on your last interrogatory. I say again, three-niner Whiskey India Alpha. And one round-eyed P.O.W., that's Papa, Oscar, Whiskey, with multiple lacerations . . ."

The singsong rhythm of the medic's voice is soothing as he continues, chewing gum as he talks, submitting his data, ending with: "Multiple gunshot wounds to the lower abdomen . . . traumatic amputation of right leg below the knee. That's a rog on your last. Negative further. Out."

On the other side of the darkness I walk into the Alabama in my mind. I walk across a plowed, sun-baked cornfield after a rain, looking for Indian weapons made out of flint.

Fwop, fwop, fwop,
and we are leaving the earth behind and it's dark outside and on the other side of the darkness I'm dreaming and I'm not unhappy, because I know that what goes around comes around and what's coming down is already on the way. The Nguyen brothers and the surviving Phuong twin and Ba Can Bo and the Woodcutter and Battle Mouth and Commander Be Dan and the people of Hoa Binh will march out of the jungle to fight again, because this is their land and we're on it.

I float in warm sleep and memories, and I am happy to know that before dawn the Woodcutter and Commander Be Dan will be back in the village, posting sentries, caring for the wounded, and burying the dead. Now the dead can sleep, forever bonded to the living, in sacred soil made rich and fertile by the blood and the bones of their ancestors.

The Woodcutter and Commander Be Dan will take care of business. Then, together, they will go looking for Song.

The medevae chopper rumbles through the night air like a flying boxcar. The wind feels good, cool and clean. Above the pounding of the rotor blades we can hear small-arms fire, far below.

We pass other choppers and somebody turns on a light. In the rolling belly of the dustoff the wounded cling to one another in the dark, bathed in the faint red glow of collision-avoidance lights.

Outbound from a cold LZ we look out of the open cargo door at the stars, killer children with bloody brown faces. Our faces are coated with a film of sweat, dirt, and smoke. We're all half-naked, our pants and boots cut off by the medics, big white emergency medical tags attached to our utility jackets, crude red Ms grease-penciled onto our foreheads. We are a tired, raggedy-assed bunch of dying grunts wrapped in muddy ponchos and shot all to shit.

We squint but do not flinch when cold wind blasts in bard through the open cargo door and whips our dirty compress bandages into our faces and fires cold drops of blood through the air like bullets.

The chopper bits a downdraft and sudden suction from the slipstream pulls with power at the flopping white battle dressings and some of the bloody bandages are sucked out through the open cargo door and we leave a trail of little ghosts flying behind us in the sky.

The Proud Flesh

History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. 
--James Joyce,  
Ulysses

Only the dead have seen the last of war. 
--Plato

The wheelies are playing basketball in the white lie ward.

Recently amputated men play basketball to learn how to control their shiny new wheelchairs. If you can play basketball in a wheelchair you can do just about anything. Except walk.

While nurses touch you from the voids which have no stars, you stand staring through a glass door at the energetic amputees. The doctors and nurses call the amputees "amps" or "ampies." The amputees, perhaps more in tune with reality, accept no slack, and prefer to call themselves "gimps."

The gimps are pieces of people with brains attached, strangely still alive, weaponless men who went off to war and interfaced with a hostile explosive device and were unlucky enough to get only half-killed. If suffering is good for the soul, then the Viet Nam war must have done the gimps a world of good.

Tough nurses force you to walk back to your own ward and lie down on a spiffy clean rack. The rack is too soft for comfort after a year of sleeping on a reed mat in the back of the Woodcutter's hooch in the village of Hoa Binh, Viet Nam. For three months you have spent most of your time on this rack, in the prone position, locked at attention like a good Marine, a vegetable waiting to be put into the stew.

To starboard a sexy nurse is sponging off the quadriplegic Seabee. They've got the Seabee laid out like a clothing store mannequin in clean blue pajamas. The nurse with the sponge is Lieutenant (j.g.) Audrey Brown. Every guy in the ward with legs wants to jump her bones and every guy with hands tries to cop a feel.

The quadriplegic Seabee's last Darvon injection is wearing off. His nose is starting to ache now because they've stuffed his nose full of plastic tubes. His jaw is wired. The only way he can express his pain is with his eyes. The nurses watch him real close because he's not a very happy guy and they think he might try to kill himself by biting his tongue off and swallowing it.

The Yokosuka Naval Hospital near Yokohama on Tokyo Bay in Japan stinks of alcohol. You sleep on a black-air pillow of painkilling drugs. You get glucose for breakfast and pretend you're having eggs.

While you eat through a hole in your arm you wiggle your fingers and your toes to verify that during the night some New Guy surgeon has not chopped off your hands and your feet. You feel lucky that you have avoided the abrupt surgery of land mine, shell, and booby trap, and the hassle of owning a flesh-colored prosthetic device, but you worry a lot about last-minute complications involving your extremities. After the war there's going to be a lot of people walking around with no feet and you have a pretty good idea that multiple amputees are not going to receive invitations to join the Pepsi generation.

They cut off a scout sniper's leg one night when his vein graft broke. He embedded his campaign ribbons into caramel candies and drank them down by chugging a quart of vodka. Then he sang drunken songs to himself. As the pins on the ribbons cut open his stomach, he bled to death.

There are those we pray won't recover. Whenever one dies, we smuggle in beer and throw a party.

Lying around being a vegetable gives you a lot of time to think, and that's not helpful. Why did you go to war? They've been trying to figure that one out since Hitler was a Corporal. You were young and the young love to travel. Now suddenly you're old and you just want to go home.

The walls of the post-op ward are eggshell white. Your pajamas are sky blue. Squid pecker-checkers in pea-green gowns and funny green shower caps patrol past the sixty beds in the ward, looking at clipboards through thick glasses and stopping to talk about you like you're not even there. If you speak to them they look at you like you're a chair that suddenly started singing "Moon River."