Profane Men (21 page)

25 April, 1964

Dear Mr.

I have been advised that, because of your talents and unique skills in communications, you might be interested in pursuing this type position with a component of the U.S. Government.

Other than to inform you that the employment would make maximum use of your background in broadcasting, and would necessitate travel overseas, I cannot give you at this time any detailed information because of the sensitive nature of the government projects involved.

If you are interested in applying for a position of this type, which will give you the opportunity to contribute to the effectiveness of the national security effort, please advise us as soon as possible and we will furnish you with the necessary application materials.

Very Truly Yours,

My eyes, even behind my shades, are being poleaxed mercilessly by the unyielding rays of the early morning sun as it beats down on the pierced steel planking and sandbags and huge wooden sign that reads,

           
fire support base king

Home of the Mighty Ninety & the

FORMULA FOR VICTORY

READINESS

+ VALOR

= THE WINNING TEAM!

Crap on a broom handle, friends, cut me a fuckin' huss with this shit. Somehow, during the night, mad Aztec surgeons infiltrated our hootch and beat me to a pulp, threw me on the floor in some sort of primitive religious sacrifice, and opened my veins, giving me a complete transfusion. All of my blood has been drained and replaced by paraffin. Where once precious bodily red flowed, wax now solidifies. My mouth tastes like I spent the night licking candles. My tongue wears a wool-lined latex sleeve, a precaution against any further such unnatural acts or excesses. My hair has begun growing backward down into the root follicles, or whatever the fuck they're called, and piercing the epidermis as each hair drives down into the skull, aiming at my brain.

I have not taken any photographs of FB King to press into the crumbling pages of my nostalgia scrapbook so that years later we can all look back on this and laugh. The concept of years later, however, has a very definite attractiveness. I am way too short for this shit. I would even, reluctantly, stay here on gumbo hill if I didn't have to get on the bird this morning and go for a ride with these other fools. I consider willing myself to have a seizure of some kind, throwing myself to the PSP in a kicking, screaming, whirling dervish holy-roller freak-out.

“Gaw damn fucker's hot awready,” White croaks in a voice that sounds like fingernails on a blackboard. “Ahm gettin' heat flustration out here.”

“That's heat frustration, you simple shit, can't you get anything right?”

My mind is a sewer of paranoia. In a land seething with conspiracy and revolution, spy and counterspy, traitor and patriot/traitor, intrigue and duplicity, plot and counterplot, ruse and gambit, all acts eventually filter down through the sieve of metaphysical mumbo-jumbo that is the Vietnamese mindset. I can feel myself taking on this strange, perverse kind of mental thing. An attitude that blends quite nicely with my normal speed freak paranoia, turning my brain into a screaming nightmare swamp of thrashing alligators and manta rays and bamboo vipers.

I hear a whomp whomp whomp high overhead and look up as a flock of bloodthirsty vampire bats flap past.

“You won't get any from me, you rabid bastards. I gave at work!” I yell.

Washington, who looks like he's still tripping, smiles at me and says wetly, “Check it out.” He is wearing a bandoleer of sorts made from small vials of skag. I'm not fucking believing it. About every fourth vial is green.

“Them's
tracers.”
Uh-huh. Not up here, mo-fuck. Can't function on that smoke now. This is the ballgame.

“Harold ain't showed.”

“Where's Harold?” somebody else asks.

“How the fuck do I know? Do I look like his fuckin' mother?”

“Yeah, you look like you fucked his mother.”

“Where's Hog?”

“Come on, girls,” Ewell says, “let's go, goddammit.”

The blinding morning sun has turned the baking ships into infernos. I hit my canteen. Ahhhh, that's right. This looks like a job for Superdex!

“Let's motivate,” says our chopper pilot, Snake Six.

“Move it!” screams Ewell. Some crew chief artist has painted savage justice across the ship, but wear and tear has taken its toll and the j-u-s-t has peeled off, so that until you get up close it looks like savage ice, a better name in the first damn place. The ship is painted black and otherwise unmarked.

“Wind that fucker.” The starter cranks in a pained scream, and the rotor blades pick up speed as the big turbine whirls to life with a roar.

A screech of feedback of deafening volume blasts through the enclosure of intense heat.

“Beautiful morning for an insertion!” the pilot, Snake Six, shouts back at us.

“Insert my dick,” someone says.

The feedback continues until somebody shouts, “Will you fix that fucker?”

Each of the Hueys holds a basic fireteam. Our slick contains pilot, copilot, door gunner (an old dude nicknamed Papa Pig), White, Washington, Ewell, me, and Shooter, who looks a little pale, like maybe he just snorted the white lines off the fucking chopper pad.

This is Big Boy City Titty. All systems are go for KILL. We have a prop/piston T-plane flying circles somewhere, a Cobra, a Loach, a trio of skinships, two radio teams, and lots, lots more.

When we home in on the KILL beam and have a locked target, we'll have all the backup we can handle.

Besides the standard complement of kickass arty, recoilless rifles, MGs, 81-mm mortar tubes, FB King has all kinds of heavyweight tac-support. They have six 105s (105-mm howitzers) backed up with a pair of the humongous 155s. These are the awesome ground movers that will shake, rattle, and, you can fucking believe, roll over some names.

Corns, our new FO, is here to call in delta tangos (defensive target strike coordinates) for our protection. A computer on board a cruiser or a destroyer anchored not far off the coastline to our east registers all that good shit, so if the FO says the word, he can walk monster six-inchers right in there on the sons of bitches. For the coup de grace, a brace of baaaad-ass Phantoms are ready to come in and dig KILL a deep, black grave.

“Snake Six, loaded.”

“Rog.”

“Snake Seven, loaded.”

“That's a rog. Snake Six up on three.”

“Snake Six up.”

“Rog.” Code numbers are pouring in and for a second I think we have KILL on the copilot's radio set or something:

“One-two-eight . . . Bravo Mike Sierra Zulu Three . . . Hotel Eleven . . .”

This is an all-pro op here. These guys aren't fucking around. You don't last long this far into injun country unless you're for real.

King runs forward support and deployment for the Mikes (Mobile Strike Force units), largely Nung mercs, who are jump-qualified and green-beanie-led headhunters.

We leave King as we found it — totally fucked.

“Sierra Tango 990-760 . . . Code Blue . . . niner-niner . . .” Radio garbage. Spookspeak heightens the paranoia.

“Roger that.” Our mission has taken on a final twist; we are probing into the heart of the Z with firm orders — avoid contact wherever necessary now — going in for the K-I-L-L kill.

A pink team will go in first, an OH-6 Loach and an AH-1G Cobra. The light observation bird goes down on the deck, searching for the signs of Charlie while the Cobra is the two of the one-two punch, ready to blanket any enemy in rockets and mini-gunfire.

Only the sound of about forty-seven helicopters and airplanes and shit to let 'em know we're coming. Sometimes you wonder what the fuckers could be thinking about, I look over at White and shout, “Total noise discipline, don't forget!”

“Hhhuuuuuuuu?” He can't hear shit over the racket.

“Total — aw, fuck it.” I shoot him the one-fingered peace sign and he pats his hog in response.

What sounds like the bone-rattling crump of heavy artillery booms ominously somewhere in the distance. We don't think too much about it. No fucking way we're there yet, we just left. Again, another tooth-jarring thump of big guns.

“Shit, that's incoming,” somebody yells over the noise.

“No sweat,” the copilot shouts back. “Those are ours!” And in that moment I feel like I do when I'm at the movies and this sexy fox wiggles her tail end across the screen and the straight man says to the comic, “Walk this way.”

All of a sudden, I know what's coming next.

Ccccrrooommmmmmmmpppp!!

“Holy shit, that fucker — ”

“Too fuckin' close!” someone else says as if he's finishing the other guy's sentence.

Static blast.

“Shotgun Arty Six, you are firing short!”

Cccrrrrrrociooommmmmnmmmppp!!

“God
damn!
”

“Hey! Shit, that was — ”

Raawwwrrrr
“ — say again, Snake Six?”

“Correct your fire, goddammit, you're comin' down way short! Right on top of us! Correct your fire!”

Zzzccrrrracccckkk!
“
—
what the fuck you tryin' to do there, goddammit — ”

My eyes try to jump out of my skull.

“Gawd damn motherfu — ”

A symphony of ear-ripping noise and disorienting sights pounds down across our field of vision and encircles our sphere of hearing in a kind of tactile blanket, wrapping our minds in panic and shock and fear as this unexpected sequence of events unwinds. It is like the projectionist got the last reel of our movie mixed up with somebody else's. No way this shit was supposed to happen, I think, as a little Loach whirls out in front of us like some drugged-out dragonfly gone insane.

The gunship flares and its miniguns spit at something. All of this happens in the quarter second it takes to hear and sense that 155 or whatever the fuck it is come screaming down out of the sky at us like a rattling, mad, roaring engine of destruction.

“Seven, up on — ”

“Holy shit!”

“Jesus!” We whirl through the black smoke.

Our radio answers somebody else's radio. Feedback replying to static in a crazed blat of tearing steel sound. You can fucking forget that radio, I think. Ain't nobody home, Jim. This sumbitch is shaking like a Magic Fingers bed run amok. Whoooaaa, Daddy!

“You're right on top of us, Shotgun Arty, correct fire, goddammit!”

Crrroooooooooooommmmmmpppp!

“Oh, my God! Shit!”

“Sonofamotheringbitch!”

“Oh! Jesus!”

“Correct fire! Correct fire!”

Zzzrrrrrrmwuiwrrrr
“ — Snake Six, over?”

“Why are those fuckers shooting at
us for chrissake, goddammit!?
”

“Jesus!”

“Correct fire, you dumb motherfuckers!”

Cccrrrrrrromminmmppppppp!
Snake Six kicks the ship into a heart-stopping evade, and we see Snake Seven's black belly flip into our field of blurring vision and then out of it all in the half a heartbeat it takes to hear that next screaming, whistling shell come rattling down through the clouds with our name on it.

“Seven, look out!”

A screaming, metallic madness stabs toward the brain.

Jackhammer jazz. “ — Seven, those are one five fives!”

“ — shooting short goddammitohell.
Extend, you sorry fuckers, you're right on top of us with that
— ”

“ — seven King leader — ”

Cr-rrrrraaaawwwwww
“ — top of me with that. You copy over?”

Cccrrrroooooommmmmmppppp!

“Aw, shit, this fuckin' shit is gonna — ”

“Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour —”

Zzzzzzrrrrraaaaaawwwwwrrrr
“ — shotgun Any Six?”

Crraavnrwwwr “ —
Snake Six. King — ”

And the train is running right on time, baby. It is the 7:14, and you are tied to a heavy wooden cross tie that spans two rusty railroad tracks, just like the wide-eyed heroine in an old-time chapter play. And now it is Episode 15: The Wheels of Doom!

The old 7:14 is never early or late, always as dependable as a railroad man's Elgin. And now the old southbound 7:14 comes around the bend in the distance, and that faggot Dick Daring is no-goddamn-where to be found.

Here she comes, chugging, snorting, and whooooo-whooooooing for all she is worth. And just as the fireman pours the coal to her and she comes a-grinding, slamming, blasting down the track toward you, that cowcatcher looking as big as the QMS as she roars across your twisting, straining, screaming body that is about to be sliced, diced, cracked, crushed, and chewed into nothing but some fine reddish mist by a force so hard, fast, terrible, unstoppable that it kills by shock waves alone.

“Help me!
Help me. Help me!
Help me goddammit helpppppppp­mmmme­eeeeeee!” You scream in mindless terror as you feel the giant, churning wheels bite through you even in that last second screaming His name, begging, pleading without shame. “Oh God, I'll do anything just get me out of here alive, God, I promise I swear I'll — ”

But it is too late and you know it and He knows it and still you scream, yelling as your tongue rips loose, screaming His name in a final, last-gasp all-purpose prayer-and-imprecation, just as the steel slices down through your life and you scream.

“Jeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeesusssssss!” and of course then you know exactly why they call the thing that holds the rotor blades on the helicopter a “Jesus nut.” Because when that son of a buck goes, you have just time enough to yell His name.

When you remember this moment twenty years later
if
you live through it, you will see it as a freeze frame. You will see it as an unforgettable still life as you feel the blades go and the eight of you poor humans in savage — ice watch that whirling dervish of a spinning death-star, a
shiruken
or a shaken or whatever the fuck they call those goony throwing stars, spinning away into space as the pitch vanishes and the noises all change and suddenly in an awful, shuddering catch of breath, this big steel coffin starts plunging down and suddenly omygodohno
We've lost the fucking rotor blades! Jesus!
Jesus nut. What a name for it.