The Phantom Blooper (8 page)

Whomp
.

Thuds and thumps are doing what enemy gunners have been having wet dreams about doing for months. They are tearing up some of the perforated steel planking from the airfield and loading it onto trucks. They use burning brooms to set fires. There are so many fires that most of the guys are wearing gas masks. The engineers are blowing up the last bunker with blocks of C-4 while working parties of tired grunts chop into sandbags with E-tools and machetes. Growling bulldozers bury any remaining trash beneath tons of red mud.

I curl up into a ball to hide and wait for darkness. I close my eyes and I try to dream. If I'm going to go one on one with the Phantom Blooper I need my beauty sleep.

If I don't kill the Phantom Blooper before we leave Khe Sanh, he will live forever.

Sometimes my dreams are too noisy, and sometimes my dreams are too quiet, and sometimes I can hear the sound of shrapnel going off in my mind.

Do you remember coonskin caps? Be sure you're right, then go ahead." Your mother bought you a pair of Davy Crockett socks and you rode to school in a big yellow bus and you sang, "The King of the Wild Frontier."

When was the last time you made a shadow monster on the ceiling of your bedroom by making your hands into a claw and holding it over a flashlight in the dark?

Do you remember Old Maid and jug-roller marbles and jawbreaker candy and prisms that made rainbows on the wall and Red Ryder BB guns and baseball cards in your bicycle spokes and how you sold flower seeds door to door?

Do you remember when Annette Funicello was a cute twelve-year-old Mouseketeer every kid was in love with and arrowhead hunting in cornfields after a rain and how to pump your arm to signal train conductors to toot their air horns and the Johnson Smith Company of Racine, Wisconsin, and *PRIZES* in Post Toasties and how you pretended to have the power to cut down telephone poles by holding your arm straight out while riding in the pickup truck with your father (carefully avoiding metal signs that might dent your blade), and do you remember the man who came to your high school and made pieces of Africa with air-filled rubber--do you remember the man who made balloon giraffes?

The monsoon rain is coming down hard and cold and the New Guy I put through Grenade School is falling asleep on guard duty, hunkered down in a hole where the guard bunker used to be, a poncho liner wrapped around his shoulders like an Indian blanket.

Cutting zulus, the New Guy nods forward, pulls himself a little rack time, then jerks his head up, opens his eyes, and looks around.

Within two minutes the New Guy's eyes narrow down to slits and his head nods forward again. When you're on guard duty, sleep is the most valuable thing in the world.

Staring into a night as black as hell's steel door, I slide past the dozing New Guy and down into our wire.

I salute Sorry Charlie, a human skull mounted on a stake in the wire. The napalm-blackened skull is wearing a pair of felt Mickey Mouse ears.

Naked except for a beat-up old Stetson on my head, and armed with an M-79 grenade launcher, and with the Kid From Brooklyn's prick-25 field radio on my back, I double-time into No Man's Land across a post-atomic dark and bloody ground.

Stars & Stripes
says that the brass have been debating about using nuclear weapons to protect Khe Sanh, which has already been the target of more bombs and shells than any place in the history of warfare. The zoomies, on average, fly bombing missions within two miles of Khe Sanh every five minutes and and drop an average of five thousand bombs a day.

From sterile red soil which has been blasted with more firepower than a six-pack of Hiroshima bombs, dragons of ground mist rise up to swallow me. Gigantic bomb craters pockmark the deck. If I fall into a shell hole I'll either break my neck or drown.

Mud sucks at my naked feet and slows me down the way it always does in nightmares when the monster is chasing you. The sucking of the mud is embarrassingly noisy.

A star cluster flare shoots up, to the north. I squat and freeze. Somebody on a night ambush is coming in early. They must have wounded.

I wait until No Man's Land is silent, so silent that even the frogs have shut up. Then I hump, and every piece of darkness has something mean and ugly hiding in it, and every shadow is full of ghosts with iron teeth, but I don't care.

Somewhere to the north, up in the black and green silence of the Dong Tri Mountains, in a small clearing in the jungle in a place without a name, Cowboy is dead where I left him. Cowboy is dead from the bullet I put through his brain.

Doc J.-for-joint is there, and Alice, and Parker, the New Guy. They're all up there somewhere, men who died not at a place but at a grid coordinate, scattered bones now, torn apart by tigers and eaten by ants. I want to live with the tigers and the ants. I want to be with my friends.

The Phantom Blooper laughs.

I stop and listen. The Phantom Blooper laughs again.

The grunts standing lines on the perimeter hear the Blooper and get wired. There's shouting and movement. In ten seconds illumination flares are going to be popping up all over this A-O.

I get a feeling that tells me I am in the process of becoming someone's favorite sight picture.

The Phantom Blooper starts talking but I can't quite hear what he's saying and I hope that the grunts on the perimeter can't hear him either because the Phantom Blooper's grasp of the situation is too damned precise and if we listen to him we'll all go plain fucking crazy.

Using my ears like an animal, I stalk the Phantom Blooper. My ears pick up each dot of sound.

Bam
. An M-79 grenade lifts a chunk of the deck in front of me, splattering me with mud and shrapnel.

Dark shadows danced and turn into monsters and larger, darker shadows swallow them.

Someone screams into my ear: "MORE ILLUM! MORE ILLUM! GOD DAMN, MORE LIGHT!"

In the Marine Corps a mine detector means that you close your eyes, put your foot out, and feel around. As I probe for mines with my toes I have a fantasy in my brain housing group in which my battle tactics turn out exactly as planned.

My fantasy of how I can be a hero begins like a movie inside my mind.:

...I have talked tough to the Phantom Blooper and I have debated, and because I am so interesting the Phantom Blooper has listened, and because I am so clever I have kept the Phantom Blooper stumped on complex philosophical questions. In fact, the Phantom Blooper is so determined to win the debate that he fails to notice that the sun has come up.

From a cloudless blue sky four First Marine Air Wing F-4 camouflage-painted Phantom fighter-bombers on Tac-Air standby slide in low and booming, locked and cocked and bingo on fuel. In my fantasy I speak the magic secret formula of numbers into the Kid From Brooklyn's field radio. I say, "Watch my smoke to target and expend all remaining."

Flames shoot out of the tails of my fantasy Phantom bombers as they hit their afterburners and roll over, banking gracefully. Marine pilots perform a ballet of aircraft and boon in to give the Phantom Blooper a taste of the only true American art form, the surgical air strike.

Fantasy silver napalm canisters and fantasy black bombs tumble down from the aircraft. Hell in very small packages. Napalm canisters tumble down two at a time, end over end, floating, glinting in the sunlight, followed by a pair of
X
s on black dots--snake eyes and nape, want some, get some.

The sky opens up and a piece of the sun breaks loose and falls down through airless space to the earth and the piece of sun hits the earth and splatters sacred gold fire across No Man's Land, a world of hurt coming down, rolling flames and thudding explosions.

Inside the boiling rage of the orange and black fireball the Phantom Blooper and I die horrible deaths as all of the air is sucked out of our lungs by force and we suffocate and in the next red moment our bodies are burned to the bone and beyond and we are two nameless Crispy Critters trapped forever inside a red and black daytime nightmare...

But that's only a fantasy.

One moment I'm trapped inside a piece of the sun, and the Phantom Blooper and I are getting payback for burning Viet Nam alive, and four Marine pilots are radioing in, "Ah, roger that. Two confirmed, K.B.A., Killed By Air." And the next moment my beautiful happy fantasy is over and I'm abruptly back in the real world. It's dark, I'm cold, and it's raining.

Hunkered down in the dark, butt-naked in a bombed-out wasteland. I'm muddy and stung by shrapnel. And my feet are cut all to shit.

A lone illumination shell from the 81 mike-mike mortars section hisses up in a high arc, pops, burns, pours down a football field of harsh white light.

The air I'm breathing turns into bullets and angry blips of red neon try to find my eyes. I know that the New Guy was sleeping, woke up when the Blooper laughed, got scared enough to shoot his own shadow, started working the 60 without remembering that I ordered him to use a frag or call in arty so that he wouldn't give away his position.

The New Guy, Private Owens, has just fired a shot in anger; he's not a New Guy anymore.

I hear footsteps.

A hot sledgehammer hits me and knocks me down. I try to get up. My mouth goes dry in an instant and my stomach turns sour. I can't breathe. I've been shot. That fucking New Guy has shot me and I try to say to him: "You're in the hurt locker now, sweet pea." But all that comes out is a cough.

I lift myself up onto an elbow and I hold my M-79 in one hand and I fire,
bloop
, at the expansive target of the New Guy's ignorance. There's a silence and then the New Guy's area comes all to pieces in slow motion. A cadence count later, the fragmentation round
thuds
.

The whole perimeter opens fire. Tracer rounds probe the darkness.

I think maybe I'm dying.

Cold hands grip my ankles. I kick. I try to kick the hands away but they are too strong. The field radio on my back snags on a root and is pulled off. I'm being dragged away, toward the jungle.

Struggling to stay conscious, I try to talk tough to the Phantom Blooper. I want to see the Phantom Blooper's black bone face.

My head bumps on a rock and I drop my M-79.

While my mind drowns in a red and black river, the Phantom Blooper is dragging my body off into the jungle to bury me alive in a Viet Cong tunnel as a wire-strapped fetus stuffed forever into a damp silent wall hundreds of feet beneath the impenetrable rain forest.

I can smell the moist black stink of jungle and I think, halfheartedly,
So this is dying, it don't mean nothing, not even.

Suddenly the darkness is cold, solid, and total.

I see a floating light. But I am a United States grunt and I know that what I am seeing is a false light, a phosphorescent glow imprinted upon the jungle floor by the decayed remains of some animal that has died there.

In the glow of the false light I can see where I've been hit. My naked shoulder looks like an old piece of saddle leather after a maniac has worked it over good with an ice pick. The skin is hard, dry, yellow-brown, and stretched too tight. In the center of the ice-pick holes is one big hole, angry red and moist.

As my eyes focus I can see that deep down in the bottom of some of the little holes are hard brown eggs. My shoulder is hot and itchy. I can't stand it anymore. I scratch hard, digging into brittle flesh with dirty fingernails, exposing the tunnel system constructed under my skin by Viet Cong worms.

Maggots come out of the holes. Maggots as white as egg flesh crawl out of the holes. Blind worms with shiny brown heads burrow beneath the thin yellow surface of my skin. Maggots crawl out of my skin through the tunnels they have made. Maggots pour out of the holes by the hundreds, wiggling wildly and squirming.

The jungle gets lighter and lighter and then brighter and brighter until the jungle is as lit up as a nighttime carnival. Every tree trunk and every plant and every leafy vine begins to radiate a strange green-yellow phosphorescent light.

Elephant grass and creepers and each leaf and gnarled root and even the interlocking triple-canopy roof of the jungle glows with light. All around me are living jungle plants full of a perfect wondrous green, and I am bathed in a warm green light of blinding intensity and everywhere I look I see jungle vines and ancient trees with light glowing deep down inside them and I surrender to the hypnotic enchantment of the world of green light and the Phantom Blooper drags me deeper and deeper into a vast and beautiful forest of green neon bamboo.

The Phantom Blooper laughs.

I laugh too

Travels With Charlie

The man who fights too long against dragons becomes a dragon himself. 
--Nietzsche

There is only one sin and that is cowardice. 
--Nietzsche

The Viet Cong schoolhouse is a spacious building of handmade yellow bricks and looks like a sunny resort villa in a Tahitian paradise. The roof is red tile. There's a small courtyard off to one side where French colonial officials used to sit and drink fancy drinks and tell jokes beneath canvas canopies.

Today the courtyard is full of laughing children taking their places on reed sleeping mats, which they unroll in perfectly aligned rows along the clean-swept classroom area. The classroom area faces a wall covered by purple bougainvillea and is shaded by a coconut palm.

Kieu Chi Song and I are laying bricks. Song is the Viet Cong schoolteacher for the village of Hoa Binh, a Viet Cong village somewhere west of Khe Sanh, near the Laotian border. Song and I got up at dawn to repair a big bite that an artillery shell took out of the low whitewashed wall that encloses the courtyard.

Enemy cannons at the Rockpile and Camp Carroll crank out fire missions twenty-four hours a day. Three or four times each week big shells pass over our village on their way to hit Viet Cong positions pinpointed by forward observers, Bird Dog spotter planes or Force Recon inserts. One shell in a hundred is a dud. One shell in fifty is a short round. Sometimes short rounds kill Vietnamese civilians in the occupied zones. Sometimes short rounds fall on enemy positions and kill American Marines. This short round took a bit out of our wall.