The Phantom Blooper (6 page)

I ignore the Beaver's junkies. The junkies don't even carry weapons anymore. Three heroin addicts have climbed up onto the black metal carcass of a burned truck. With faces like empty rooms and eyes like slivers of egg white, they watch the battle.

Bullets bounce off the deck.

I dive into the guard bunker in the First Platoon area, twisting my ankle in the process and knocking a chunk of skin off of my damned knee.

Thunder and Daddy D.A. are already on deck. Daddy D.A., honcho of Second Platoon, is manning the field radio, calling in close air support. He says to me, "The birds are in the air. Phantoms and B-52s."

Thunder stands on a firing parapet of dirt-filled rope-handled artillery shell crates, calmly sighting in with the Redfield sniper's scope on his Remington 700 high-powered hunting rifle.

On quiet days when NVA grunts with a piece of slack sit swapping scuttlebutt and scarfing up a few bennies, a thousand yards downrange, sometimes
bang
, their commanding officer's brains come out, leaving the NVA snuffies squatting in the treeline with mouths open because they never even heard a shot.

"Thunder," I say. "Want some, get some."

Thunder looks back at me, grins, gives me a thumbs-up.

I should remind Thunder that this is not the time to be an artist, and that he should bust caps. But I know that Thunder has his own style. Thunder has said many times, "I am the aristocrat of snipers--I only shoot officers."

Thunder's Remington kicks,
crack-ka
, and somewhere in beautiful downtown Hanoi there's a gook mama-san who does not know that she no longer has a son.

First Platoon is on the firing line, selector switches on full automatic rock and roll, putting out the rounds, chopping brass, breathing through their mouths, eyes big, necks way down into their flak jackets like muddy turtles, assholes puckered to the max, balls up in their throats, slapping aluminum magazines into their black plastic rifles with a jerky rhythm and holding the triggers down.

Boom.

"Oh, FUCK."

"Shit."

"R.P.G.," I say--rocket-propelled grenade. Beaucoup pucker factor.

"Son of a bitch!"

"THERE!"

"Where?" says Thunder, scanning with his sniper's scope. "Come on...come on..." He adjusts his sling for a tighter grip. "Come on, baby..." Ignoring the AK fire punching holes into the outboard side of our bunker, Thunder sets the dope on his weapon and squeezes off a round.
Crack-ka.

Thunder looks back at us, grins, gives us a thumbs-up. "Grease one. Ah, be advised, Khe Sanh Six, that's one confirmed on your R.P.G." He wiggles his eyebrows, makes a face, and laughs, a dark-haired handsome boy with perfect teeth. He leans back into his sniper's scope, laughs, and then,
crack-ka
, shoots somebody else.

M-16s are whacking and whacking and AK-47s are popping and popping and the two sounds collide, blending together in an unending roar like the passing of a train on a rickety track.

On the perimeter to port, Black John Wayne's squad of street Marines is making a stand. Sappers are heaving in satchel charges and laying bamboo ladders on top of the wire. Hardcore NVA grunts hit the wire running. And as fast as they come up, Black John Wayne and his men kill them, chop, chop, blood on the wire.

Gray smoke from our 105 howitzer drifts over our position. The smoke stinks of cordite and smells like the sulfur that burns in hell. Sand fills the air, a fine red mist. Our bunker is shaking nonstop now as the sandbagged walls absorb incoming small-arms fire and the thud of grenades.

"Shit," says Daddy D.A., dropping the field radio handset. "The zoomies say E.T.A. two-zero minutes."

Thunder squeezes off a round,
crack-ka
, and says, "They're coming through the wire."

The whole base is lit up now, with dozens of illumination flares wobbling down under small white parachutes, leaving faint luminescent worm trails. Everything looks phony, lifeless, stark, and stagy, like an abandoned set for a low-budget monster movie. The battlefield before us is a noisy, black-and-white outdoor classroom for student gravediggers. Cold white light of abnormal intensity casts shadows that are dark, deep, and deformed.

I look to port. I say, "D.A., call this in to the C.P.--reaction force to Sandbag City. I want them to set in and stand by for a movement order. Tell the cannon cockers to stand by to fire on Black John Wayne's position at my command. Black John Wayne is going to be overrun."

Daddy D.A. grunts. "You got it, Joker."

The gooks are coming at us in a human wave assault, a swaying wall of massed men, pouring into our wire, spilling into the gaps blown by the sappers. When they're hit, dying enemy grunts remember to fall flat across the wire so that their friends in the next wave can use their dead bodies as stepping stones. They come in through automatic rifle fire, mines, grenades, and .50-caliber machine guns. They come in through salvos of artillery shells that weight ninety-five pounds each. The human waves come on in, crashing into the thin green line, soaking up all of our ordinance and our anger and hit by so many shells and bullets that they can't fall down.

An ocean of highly motivated yellow midgets ready to pay the price is flooding up the hill, bringing beaucoup pain for grunts.

As I burn up magazines in my M-16 I feel proud to be attacked by these brass-balled little hardasses, and proud to be killing them. The most inspiring thing I've seen around here lately are these NVA gooks and the way they attack. They come in lean and mean, the best light infantry since the Stonewall Brigade.

Thunder looks back at us and says, "Black John Wayne is being overrun."

Black John Wayne's squad of black Marines is standing tall in the perimeter trench.

Black John Wayne stands flat-footed above the trenchline, bigger than King Kong, and fires his M-60 machine gun point-blank into a rolling wave of about one million NVA gooks. Black John Wayne and the bloods fight hand to hand until they are cut off and surrounded.

Thunder, Daddy D.A., and I are all out of the bunker quicker than a gook can shit rice, hauling ass down the slippery catwalk, jerking New Guys to their feet.

By the time we double-time to Black John Wayne's position there are fifty Marines with us, from four different platoons, and we're pumping, pumping, a little adrenaline cocktail to cleanse the blood, pumping on wild animal anger and righteous indignation, pumping, pumping, we are United States grunts and we have come down to battle, and by God we can't wait to kill anybody who fucks with our friends, we're running into the black metal whirlwind like big-assed birds, we are all going to die and we just can't wait because life in the shit is a rush and we feel alive and perfect and goddamn beautiful, because we are being who we came here to be, and we are doing what we came here to do, and we are doing it really good, and we know it.

Black John Wayne hangs tough, firing his M-60 until the barrel glows red and white. But an NVA flame thrower roars across the trenchline and then Black John Wayne is a black man wearing fire as formal attire and his bulky body jerks like a puppet and he dances as M-16 rounds in his bandoliers cook off, and then the M-60 in his hands blows up, and Black John Wayne is still standing, while advancing NVA troops move around him and out of his way. He holds on to his throat with both hands, like a man trying to strangle himself, or like a man trying to pull off his own head. And he falls.

We hit the rice-propelled Communist gooks in the left flank and we cut them up good. We pop their arms and legs off. We spread out above the perimeter and isolate each pocket of NVA grunts inside our wire and we blast them until they are unrecognizable chunks of dead meat wrapped in dirty rags. We shoot them at such close range that powder burns set fire to their khaki shirts.

We jump down on top of them in the trenchline and we beat them to death with entrenching tools and we stab them in the face with K-bar knives and we chop off their heads with machetes.

Then we stand up in our perimeter trench and face outboard and fire a blinking stream of hard red iron into balls, bellies, and thighs, and we cut them down as they come up the hill.

Somewhere someone is swearing at God and somewhere a chorus of November Hotels, non-hackers, begs, "CORPSMAN! CORPSMAN! CORPSMAN!"

We don't care. Fuck the wounded and fuck their candy-ass personal problems. We don't have time to listen to their crying. The flood of little yellow soldiers is falling back, out of our reach, and this drives us crazy.

We climb out of the trenchline and slide on our asses into our own wire and we climb over dead gooks piled three deep and we kick tangled, blasted strands of barbed wire out of our way and we chase the retreating wall of noise and muzzle flashes, and at every movement, scream, and sound we fire our hot rifles blindly until we run out of ammunition. Then we rob ammunition from our dead.

By battle magic a gook pops up in front of me. He runs at me, firing as he comes. Magic jerks my M-16 out of my hands. The gook is busting caps with a full banana clip, spraying the area with thirty rounds of AK to cut himself a path.

Dirt jumps up off the deck and hits me in the face.

I draw my Tokarev automatic pistol from my shoulder holster and I shoot the gook in the chest. He comes on, firing, bayonet fixed. I can see his clean-cut teenage face, his flat nose, his crudely cropped black hair, his black gook eye. I shoot him in the chest twice and the rounds jerk him up, but he's still coming.

Fingers of hot air tug at my jungle utilities like magic. I feel like a clown without any lines to say in a slapstick comedy war movie. I'm expected to stand here and look tough while this gook magician guts me with a bayonet. The situation is pretty damned embarrassing. How far can dead man run?

I don't know what I'm supposed to do, so I shoo the gook four more times before he slams into me like a miniature linebacker and knocks me down and runs over me and then I'm falling and when I hit the deck with my face a major earthquake hits Khe Sanh and my eardrums burst.

After the blackness fades to sunlight and the earthquake is over, I'm sitting on the deck among butchered things, works of the black art I have helped to create. The NVA dead all look like failed contortionists. Stretcher bearers and corpsmen are picking through the dirty red driftwood of battle, gooks, half-gooks, and pieces of gooks. The stretcher bearers load up with friendly wounded and carry them away, leaving behind dead Marines wrapped in muddy ponchos.

Grunts walk by without speaking, their eyes locked on the horizon but not seeing, eyes rimmed with red, eyes locked inside sweaty faces caked with dust thrown up by the shells, the unfocused eyes of the half-dead staring in astonished disbelief at the strange land of the half-alive--the thousand-yard stare.

Daddy D.A. is standing over me, yelling, but I can't hear anything. I put my hands on my ears.

Dead on the deck beside me is a gook with pink plastic guts piled on his chest. The guts are crawling with black flies. On the dead gook's ankles are loops of comm wire his friends would have used to drag his dead body off into the jungle.

A squeaky elf's voice real far away says, "You shot his heart out! You shot his heart out!"

I say to Daddy D.A.: "Huh?"

Suddenly my field of vision is invaded by the ruddy face of the Grim Reaper, the dumbest twenty-year Major in the Marine Corps and the biggest shitbird on the planet. He's yelling. His voice fades in and out, which is okay with me, because judging from the scowl on the Reaper's face he's not saying anything I want to hear.

"I'll run your ass up on charges!" the Reaper says to me. He leans down, thumbs out his collar, taps his gold rank insignia with a bony forefinger. "I will bust you below private!"

Smiling, I say, "You're on my list, Reaper."

The Reaper snears, struts away.

As my hearing returns, Daddy D.A. gives me the straight skinny. The Reaper is going to write me up on an Article 15, office hours, because the Beaver told the Reaper that the reason we were caught off guard by the ground attack was because I was sleeping on guard duty. But I won't face a court-martial because the Beaver, as my Platoon Sergeant, stood up for me and asked the Reaper to go easy on me because I'm crazy.

The ground attack was only a probe in force. Our gungy counterattack was a waste of time and good grunts. The Reaper had already issued the order for the rifle companies on our flanks to retreat. Khe Sanh would have fallen on its last day in existence if the B-52s had not arrived. The bombers dropped a tight pattern of two-thousand pound blockbusters one hundred yards outside our wire, saving our asses, one more time.

The Beaver, D.A. explains, is being put in for the Silver Sat for heroism under fire because he claims he personally led the counterattack. And the Beaver will be awarded a Purple Heart for a painful mouth wound he received during brutal hand-to-hand combat with elite North Vietnamese troops. Finally, the Reaper plans to recommend the Beaver for promotion to Staff Sergeant due to meritorious service.

Daddy D.A. is asking me if I feel okay and am I sure I'm not hit when the Reaper and the Beaver dittybop by. The Beaver glances over at me, preens a little, and smirks a lot. Eddie Haskell and Lumpy follow three paces behind. Eddie Haskell gives me what is supposed to be a real mean look, then gives me the finger.

The Reaper puts his arm around the Beaver's shoulders and says, "I do like to see the arms and legs fly!" The Beaver nods and nods, tries to smile, tries to speak, winces in pain, and Daddy D.A. and I get a quick glimpse of the heavy black thread knotted through the tip of the Beaver's tongue. Daddy D.A. is confused when I start laughing hard enough to crack a rib.

The Beaver looks over at us, puzzled, and I roar.

Some salty Corporal from Third Platoon souvenirs us a couple of warm beers. There's mud in my beer but I don't care; there's mud on my teeth. All I can think about is how the rising sun hurts my eyes. I want to crawl up into my Conex box and sleep for one thousand years.

Daddy D.A. helps me to stand up. But before we climb back up to the perimeter, Daddy D.A. and I drink a toast to the Viet Cong grunt dead on the deck at our feet, an enemy individual so highly motivated that he KO'd my fat American ass even after I dinged him and zapped him and waste him and killed him, in so many, so many times.