The Phantom Blooper (2 page)

Enemy sappers crawl into our wire every night. Your basic operational model gook will take six hours to crawl six yards. Sappers cut attack lanes in the wire, tape the wire back, then smear the tape with mud. They turn our Claymores around. Sometimes a gung ho sapper will get close enough to heave a fourteen-pound satchel charge into a perimeter bunker. Those who don’t blow themselves up on an antipersonnel mine get hung up in the wire or trip a flare. Then we demonstrate leatherneck hospitality by grenading them and shooting them to death.

Incoming patrols sometimes bring in confirmed kills and throw them into the wire as war trophies.

The North Vietnamese Army likes to probe us with ground attacks. They drag their wounded off to tunnel hospitals. They bury their dead in shallow graves in mangrove swamps. Wasted gooks unlucky enough to get left behind hang in the triple strand concertina wire until maggots hollow them out from the inside and they fall apart.

Rotting corpses can get to smelling pretty bad sometimes. We really should bury them, but we don’t. Nobody likes to police up dead gooks. You grab confirmed kills by the ankles or by the wrists and their arms and legs come off in your hands like sticks. If you try to pick up what’s left of the torso sometimes your fingers slip into an exit wound and then you’re standing there with a handful of maggots.

Besides, we enjoy throwing dead gooks into the wire. A dead gook hanging in our wire in less than mint condition is a handy audio-visual aid to keep our enemies honest. We want everybody we do business with to know who we are and what we stand for and take seriously.

Now down in the rain in the dark the Kid From Brooklyn is digging into mildewed pockets for colorful bits of gummed paper.

It all started when the Kid From Brooklyn pulled an R&R in Japan. He took the bullet train to Kyoto, scarfed up beaucoup sake and Japanese bennies, and took long hot baths with slant-eyed naked jailbait.

“I’m a salty Lance Corporal who is short, short, short,” the Kid From Brooklyn said when he came back from Japan. “I’m so short, I could fall of a dime. I’m so short the gooks probably can’t even see me.”

In Tokyo the Kid sourvenired himself a small black stamp album. Now he’s back in-country to pull his tour of duty in a world of shit. Only he’s different now. He has changed. Now the Kid From Brooklyn is a dedicated stamp collector.

Enemy postage stamps depict exciting scenes of war and politics. North Vietnamese troops shake hands with smiling Viet Cong under a Communist red star and wreath. Columns of ragged and forlorn American prisoners of war are marched off to Hanoi prison camps. A helicopter gunship with an over-sized U.S. on its side plunges to earth in flames to the cheers of an all-girl peasant militia crew behind the village anti-aircraft gun. An old papa-san walks along a paddy dike, a hoe in one hand and a rifle in the other.

I watch the Kid From Brooklyn, hunched over a suspended carcass, indulging himself in his grubby hobby. I know that it is my job to climb down there and drag his section eight ass back behind the wire where it belongs.

I know that I should do that, most ricky-tick, but I don’t. I need him as bait.

“Damn,” the Kid From Brooklyn says, gently shaking his leg loose from a wild strand of tanglefoot that has caught him in the ankle. He bends down to another shredded lump of shadow and frisks it for diaries, wallets, piasters, love letters, and crumbling black-and-white photographs of gook girlfriends. Everything that looks like it might have postage stamps in it gets stuffed into one of the cargo pockets on the front of his baggy green trouser legs.

In the monsoon rain the Kid is a black silhouette. His poncho is outlined by silver blips. He is a perfect target. Gook snipers in the dark can hear the rain bouncing off the Kid’s poncho. The Phantom Blooper can see the black buttplate of the Kid’s M-16, slung barrel-down to keep the rain out of the bore.

I should try to save the Kid From Brooklyn’s bacon, but I won’t. I can’t. Marines are not elite amphibious shock troops anymore. We have been demoted to expendable seafood. In Viet Nam we’re only cheap live bait, impaled on an Asian hook, wiggling until we draw fire and die. Dying, that’s what we’re here for, our Parris Island Drill Instructors would say: “Blood makes the grass grow.”

I pick up the handset to the Kid From Brooklyn’s field radio. The handset has been taped up inside a clear plastic bag. I whistle softly. I grunt. I say, “This is Green Millionaire, Green Millionaire, First Platoon Actual. I want illumination, ladies. I want illumination and I want it immediately fucking now.”

First Platoon is sleeping, totally exhausted after an eighteen-hour day of loading six-bys.

An endless convoy of trucks has been hauling off live howitzer shells, wooden pallets stacked high with cases of C-rations, mountains of plywood and building beams, and tons of sheets of perforated steel planking torn up from the airfield.

First Platoon is cutting a few well-earned zulus. Time to wake them up. Time to wake the whole base up.

The handset sizzles with static and someone says, “Rog. Pop one. Shot out.”

I heft my M-60 to port arms the way they do it in the movies and I squint harder and harder into an expanding darkness. But my night vision is not what it used to be. There’s no movement. No muzzle flashes. No sound but the rain.

One word from me and the Phantom Blooper will be in the bottom of red-mud swimming pool shitting Pittsburgh steel. If a frog farts I will bury that frog under a black iron mountain of American bombs. And even if this dirty zero-zero weather keeps the big birds grounded I can always get arty in. One magic set of two-word six-number map coordinates spoken into my radio handset and the cannon cockers get wired and in forty seconds I can crank up more firepower than a Panzer division.

Somewhere in the rear a mortar tube
fumps
.

My finger squeezes up all the slack on the trigger. I take a deep breath. I’ve got the jungle covered. I’m looking forward to working the 60 and cutting up the black night with red lines of bullets.

Five hundred yards downrange and moon high, a mute
pock
. Light, vast, harsh, and white, spills out across the black sky, melts, then floats down with the rain. An illumination flare sways under a little white parachute, squeaking and dripping sparks that hiss and pop.

I hold my breath and freeze. Now is not the time to make a wrong move. The Phantom Blooper is just waiting for me to do something stupid like a New Guy.

Down in the wire, the Kid From Brooklyn stops and looks up at the light. Near Sorry Charlie, our pet skull, the Kid hunkers down, pounded by cold gusts of wind and monsoon rain.

Black laughter drifts in from No Man’s Land. The Kid turns outboard and slowly unslings his rifle. Behind his rain-fogged glasses his eyes are big in his face.

There is the sound of a metallic wine bottle popping open and there is the moment of perfect silence and then one M-79 blooper fragmentation grenade hits the Kid From Brooklyn and the Kid From Brooklyn does a very bad impression of John Kennedy campaigning in Dallas and in silent slow motion the Kid From Brooklyn’s head dissolves into a cloud of pink mist and then
bam
and the Kid From Brooklyn falls in pieces all over the area, blown away, killed in action and wasted, shot dead and slaughtered.

The Kid From Brooklyn’s headless body is a contorted blob of wax in the ghost light of the illumination flare. One arm gone. One arm converted to pulp. Legs bent too far and in the wrong directions. Ribs curving up incredibly white from inside a glistening black cavity which, as though on fire, is steaming.

Abruptly, illumination fades. Night falls on my position. A shadow walks across my field of fire.

I cling to the cold metal of my machine gun, my mouth dry, teeth gritted, finger aching, hands white, knuckles bleeding where I’ve bitten them, sweat stinging my eyes, stomach pumping in and out, and I’m shaking.

The Phantom Blooper knows where I am now. He knows where I live. Out there beyond the wire in that deep black jungle the Phantom Blooper can hear the sounding of the gong that is the beating of my heart.

I try to let go of the machine gun, but I can’t let go.

Hunkered down, I hold my breath, afraid to fire.

Beaver Cleaver, who likes to tell people who don’t know any better that he is our Platoon Sergeant, is cutting himself a big piece of slack up in his luxurious bunker. The bunker was constructed to the Beaver’s precise specifications by the Seabees in exchange for six Willy Peter bags full of marijuana. No doubt the Beaver is sitting on his rack, drinking cold beer, and watching
Leave It To Beaver
reruns on his battery-powered, Thai-subtitled Japanese television.

I wait until dark, pull on some rotting jungle utilities and some Ho Chi Minh sandals, and crawl out of the rat’s next of crumpled body bags and parachute silk I’ve made for myself inside a Conex box. The time on deck is oh-dark-thirty. Time to walk lines.

I have walked lines hundreds of times at Khe Sanh. Tonight everything is new and strange. I feel like a blind man after some sadist has moved all the furniture. In the moonlight I’m falling down all over the place like some kind of fucking New Guy. The bulldozers of the Eleventh Engineers have definitely wasted my area. Even the bunkers are not where they are supposed to be. I feel lost. My hometown has been taken away, stacked, burned, or evacuated.

The Marine Corps moves in mysterious ways.

Every twenty meters I stoop down and tug at the barbed wire with det cord crimps to see if the wire has been cut. The tugging scares up bunker rats big enough to stand flat-footed and butt-fuck a six-by. I scan the tanglefoot to see if it looks tight enough to hold the weight of falling dead men. I check the position of each Claymore mine. We paint the backs of our Claymores white so we can count them in the dark and see that they are still facing outboard.

I keep one eye on the darkness out beyond the wire. While fireteams of highly motivated mosquitoes try to scarf me up as their midnight chow I wait for the shadows beyond the wire to turn into people. At night we enter that world where all men are phantoms.

There are things out there in the dark, things that move. Maybe a torn and decaying sandbag being blown around by the wind. Or a stray water buffalo. Or a patch of night thrown down by a cloud passing in front of the moon. Or maybe those black dots shimmering out there at five hundred yards are cold and hungry Viet Cong troopers silently colliding and massing for a ground attack.

Or maybe the Blooper. The Phantom Blooper could be out there, sighting me in.

Tomorrow we blow the wire. Growling green bulldozers will plow down the last of our bunkers and Khe Sanh Combat Base won't be here anymore. The Marine Corps won't be here anymore. Until then, the hills are full of gooks and Khe Sanh is their hobby. Enemy recon teams eyeball us from the ridgelines, probing for any sign of slack. They still want this fog-cursed place.

Life in the V-ring:

Inside the only guard bunker still standing in our area, our New Guy is busy choking his lizard. The New Guy's teenaged horny brain has left Khe Sanh and has gone back to the World and has wrapped itself up inside Suzie Rottencrotch's pretty pink panties. He groans, abusing government property, polishing his bayonet, just a little early-morning organ practice to cut the edge off the cold; the Marines have landed and the situation is well in hand. What is the sound of one hand clapping?

I hop down into the bunker.

A field radio buzzes. I pick up the handset while the New Guy fumbles frantically with the buttons on his fly.

Some fucking pogue lifer standing radio watch in the Sandbag City command post demands a sit-rep, then yawns out loud.

Instead of saying "all secure" in a mechanical monotone, I say with an exaggerated gook accent: "This is General Vo Nguyen Giap speaking. Situation normal, all fucked up."

The fucking pogue lifer on the radio laughs and says, "Wait one." Then he says to someone in the background, "It's Joker. He says he's a Jap." Both pogues laugh and talk about how crazy I am and then the radio voice says, "Affirm, Joker. Roger that," and I put down the handset.

The New Guy is waiting for me, standing almost at attention.

Since the Phantom Blooper started wasting the white grunts with the most T.I.--time in--all I've got left are New Guys. The replacement pipeline pulls cherries out of high school and ships them to Khe Sanh. Half of my people are salty black grunts, but Black John Wayne has ordered the bloods to stand down and to stand by for mutiny. The Grim Reaper, Major Travis, chooses to pretend the mutiny does not exist.

Meanwhile, New Guys have to be watched. Along about midnight, when the Phantom Blooper walks and talks, New Guys wet their pants. Nobody wants to die alone and in the dark.

I try to scare the living shit out of New Guys. The wrong kind of fear can kill you but the right kind of fear can keep you alive. New Guys do not see with the hard eyes of grunts. Not all grunts see those black facts that are as hard as diamonds, only the quick. The dead are kids who can't get wired to the program, and pay the price. Here it's grow up now, grow up fast, grow up overnight, or you don't grow up at all. There it is. The usual ration of civilian bullshit is poison here. Bullets are real metal. Bullets don't give a damn that you were born stupid.

Only in Viet Nam is hypocrisy fatal.

New Guys will bore you to death if you give them half a chance. They tell you scuttlebutt. They complain. They pop up with platitudes they've found on bubblegum cards, silly shit about the origins of the universe and the meaning of life. They tell you where they went to boot camp, about thigh school athletic awards they've won, and they show you pictures of teenaged girls they claim are their girlfriends. They tell you what they think they've learned about themselves, God, and their country, and they tell you their opinions about Viet Nam. That's why New Guys are so dangerous. They're thinking all the time about how light refracts through water to create rainbows and why a seed grows and about how they used to cop a feel on Suzie Rottencrotch and so they don't see the trip wire. When they get killed, they have so many things on their minds that they forget to stay alive.