Chickenhawk: Back in the World - Life After Vietnam

The romantic memories of my first helicopter as a plucky, smooth-flying machine vanished. The Hiller was actually an ungainly, crude museum piece of a helicopter. I held it in a sort of hover, wallowing and pitching in a slight breeze, checking the tachometer and adjusting the throttle on the collective to keep the needles in the green because I’d forgotten how the engine sounded at the right RPM.

“Not bad,” Lineberry said. “Let’s go fly.”

By the Christmas break I had been an IP for a month and Patience and I were pretty well settled. We’d rented a house in Mineral Wells, an all-American place with a garage and backyard. This was the first house we’d lived in together. We were married in 1963, just before I joined the Army. Patience and our son, Jack, had endured crummy apartments and trailers while I went through basic training, advanced infantry training, and flight school. They seldom saw me while I was a trainee soldier, and then I went to Vietnam. Jack, two years old now, was getting used to me again. I’d been away half his life and had missed the previous Christmas. I wanted to make him a present to show him I was just a regular dad. I was home. I was going to build things, pursue hobbies, do well at work. Forget.

I wasn’t thinking about Vietnam, but it was there. Awake, in quiet moments, I felt a familiar dread in the pit of my stomach, even as I angrily informed myself that I was home. Asleep, my dreams were infected by what I’d seen. The explosive jump-ups I’d been having since the last month of my tour were getting more frequent. When Patience and Jack saw me leaping off the bed, Patience would make a joke of it: “Daddy’s levitating again.” But it scared her. I had asked the flight surgeon about it and he said I should be okay in a couple months.

During the two-week Christmas break I spent most of my time teaching myself how to print photographs at the craft shop or building Jack’s present—a rocking horse I designed, which Patience said had to be big enough for her, too—at the wood shop. I thought I could obliterate memories of Vietnam by staying so busy I couldn’t think about it.

A collection of my photographs began to assemble on our dining room wall. A few were prints of pictures I’d taken in Vietnam, but most were of abandoned farm buildings, rusted farm equipment, and stark Texas scenes taken when Patience and Jack and I went for drives. One of the Vietnam pictures was of a second lieutenant and three of his men, tired, dirty, but alive, sitting on a paddy dike. I called it “Ghosts.” Patience asked why. “Because they are all dead. Everyone we dropped off in that LZ is dead.”

The photographs were technically good.

The rocking horse turned out big and sturdy. Jack named it Haysup. Why Haysup? “It’s his name!” Jack said.

I was staying busy, but fear, my familiar Vietnam companion, visited me at odd moments, even times when I should’ve been happy. Normal people didn’t have these bouts with fear. I knew that because I had been normal once, long ago. I looked forward to flight school starting again so I could lose myself in my work, shake these feelings.

I drove Patience and Jack out into the country to fetch a Christmas tree. While I chopped it down and Patience and Jack happily collected small branches to trim our house, I searched the dark places in the woods where snipers could hide.

Our students had completed the primary stage of flight training when they got to us. Their civilian instructors had taught them the basics of flying the helicopter; our job was to teach them how to use it in the field. From Wolters they would go to Fort Rucker in Alabama and learn to fly Hueys. They’d take their final exam in Vietnam. I took my work seriously because the candidates who made it through this school needed to be very good pilots to survive. The government could send these eager guys to a stupid war, but I could help them live through it.

I was standing on a rock watching one of my four students pacing off a confined area to determine the best spot for the takeoff. The Hiller chugged nearby, its collective tied down, idling. I pulled out a cigarette from my flight suit and patted my pockets for my Zippo. Left it home. Student didn’t smoke. Walked over to the Hiller, put the cigarette in my mouth, and strained my head in among the chugging machinery to press the cigarette against the engine exhaust manifold. Sucked until the end glowed. Stood back, drew a deep breath of smoke, looked at the Hiller. Why’d I do that? If any of that spinning shit had grabbed my clothes, I would’ve been chewed up. I see chewed up: guts and brains and green tin cans; muddy snapped bones and burned-off skin; bloody crotches and empty eye sockets—

“Sir, I’ve got it measured,” student said to me, and gruesome images faded to his bright face. He turned around and told me his plan, pointing as he spoke. “I’ll hover backward, following the trail of stones I laid out until I reach the marker stone—”