“Here.” After getting his eye poked by Connors’s elbow, Riker’s normally ruddy complexion had flushed to lobster. He was a serious man, almost humorless.
“Okay.” Captain Shaker folded the roster sheet and put it under his arm and awaited inspection. Unlike the rest of us, he was not wearing a rumpled flight suit. He preferred to dress out in fatigues after the morning exercises, with shined boots. Being the platoon leader, he was serious about being a soldier first, a pilot second.
Ensign Wall of the navy and Col. Roger Dogwell of the army strolled around the corner from the other side of the ship as Shaker finished. Wall always seemed ready to burst into giggles. He was the only navy man on board and therefore in charge of the ship and equal in position to Dogwell. Dogwell was big and looked as if he would have liked to tie the ensign into some kind of handy knot. Shaker gave a loose salute, and the grinning ensign tapped his forehead with a finger. Dogwell scowled.
“Everybody here?” asked the ensign.
“Yes, Mr. Wall, everybody’s here.” Shaker’s tone implied, Where do you think they are, walking in the park?
“Sir, where’s Banjo?” Connors suddenly asked.
“I’m right here, you asshole.” Banjo gave Connors a jab with an elbow.
“Oh, thank God, thank God.”
“That’s enough.” Shaker turned and glared. Wall grinned. Dogwell looked positively vicious. The colonel said the only word I heard him say on the trip: “Pilots.”
Leese sat next to me at breakfast.
“I’ve assigned you to fly a ship off the carrier when we get to Qui Nhon.” He smiled.
“Really?” I smiled back weakly. I still wasn’t at all confident about flying the Huey.
“Something wrong?” Leese asked. “You look kind of sick. This chow getting to you?”
“No, the chow’s okay. I’m not too sure about my ability to fly a Huey off a carrier.”
“It says here”—he produced a penciled note—“that you’re checked out in Hueys. All four models.” He looked back at me.
“Well, I have flown them, but it was mostly time under the hood at altitude. I had about ten hours of contact-flying instruction in them.”
“How long have you been out of flight school?” I noticed smile wrinkles around his eyes as he looked at the front of his paper and then at the back.
“I graduated in the middle of May.”
“So you don’t feel too confident flying off the ship?”
“That’s right.”
“Okay.” He put his notes on the plastic tablecloth next to his food tray. “I’ve just reassigned you to fly with me.”
“Thanks. I’d rather not end my tour just getting off the boat.”
“Oh, I’m sure you wouldn’t have any trouble, but I need a copilot, and from what you say, you need the practice.”
After breakfast I went back to my bunk to find my checklist. I was rusty on the start-up procedure. I got the checklist from my flight bag and walked back to the hangar deck to find a Huey to practice in.
The trail from our hatchway back through the interior of the ship to the mess hall was like a jungle path through piles of boxes, bags, coils, barrels, cases, and Hueys. Usually the trail was crowded, but I was alone between feeding shifts. In the middle of the deck I squeezed between two fuselages and pushed toward where a large light bulb glowed into the cockpit of a Huey. This was far enough away from the trail for privacy. I didn’t want the old salts to see me. Those guys could go through the entire start-up procedure about as quickly as-I used my Zippo.
I opened the left cockpit door. Everything inside looked the same except for the armored pilots’ seats. The armor meant that bullets were expected to be whizzing through the cockpit. Why had I argued so strongly with the elimination board?
I would be flying one of these into battle, something I had never considered as a kid daydreaming about saving flood victims, rescuing beautiful girls, or floating among the treetops picking apples. Not once in any of my fantasies did I have people shooting at me.
I sat in the first pilot’s seat—the right seat—and looked around. Because our Hueys had no guns except the machine guns the crew chief and gunner used, they were called slicks. Our job would be to carry troopers into the landing zones. People on the ground would be trying to blast us out of the air. Unlike the gunship pilots, we would not be able to shoot back. I could not imagine how that was going to feel.
The armor added 350 pounds to the aircraft and displaced two grunts. I knocked it with my knuckles. The ceramic and steel laminations, built up to about half an inch thick, fit around and under the seat, made of aluminum frame with red nylon mesh. A sliding armored panel on the side of the seat next to the door pulled forward, protection for the torso but not for the head. We’d be issued chest armor when we got to Vietnam. It seemed pretty complete. I could not imagine bullets going anywhere but into the armor, because in the hangar deck of the Croatan no one was shooting.
I put my checklist down on top of one of the radios in the console between the two pilots’ seats and twisted around to look at the cargo deck behind me. It was U-shaped because of the intrusion of the hell-hole cover that enclosed the transmission and hydraulics directly under the mast. Our two door gunners would be stationed on either side of the hell-hole cover—in the pockets—firing M-60 machine guns attached to pylons. During our first two months, though, the machine guns would simply be strung from the top of the open doorways on elastic bungee cords. With the crew chief and gunner in the pockets, there was enough room for eight or ten troopers on the cargo deck.
I turned around to face front, and relaxed. While the Croatan rolled on the sea, I reviewed the cockpit check, and remembered Patience.
“Sitting around like this all day makes a feller want to go out and strangle somebody, just for fun,” said Decker. Decker was an Arkansan from the other platoon. A dusty, disheveled guy whose sandy crew cut even looked rumpled, he was always with his close friend and fellow Arkansan Captain Morris. Together they swapped Southern aphorisms like “He was happier than a dead hog in the sunshine.”
Morris was close to forty, and though he kidded with Decker, he looked worried. His thinning black hair was combed back with Brylcream, and his mouth was set thoughtfully, from years of concentration. He was a model-maker. He had acquired the plans of the Croatan from the boatswain and was spending most of his time building a detailed model of it. He even had the rust in the right places. When I got tired of watching the bow or reading or playing chess, I would often watch Morris at work. It was fascinating. His careful hands and peaceful face told me he liked doing what he was doing. But why the Croatan? Morris explained that the Croatan was the last of its kind. I liked and respected Morris. He seemed to be coping better than I during these endless days.
If I had a favorite time of day, it was the late afternoon, as the sun was setting. One day, as I stood in the bow watching the sun drop into the sea, I spotted something far ahead on the horizon—something on the ocean besides the Croatan. Contact with aliens. We are not alone.
A guy came up on the bow and propped his elbows on the steel ledge to brace his large binoculars. The thing out in front of us was dark and twisting, like a sea serpent.
“Looks like a tree branch,” he said. “Something on it, too. Can’t tell what, though.” We waited. “Those things on it are seagulls,” the guy announced to the growing crowd. “They’re turned away from us. I don’t think they know we’re coming.”
The Croatan was on a collision course with the twenty-foot branch and its two passengers.