A Chinook Christmas

More so now than before, every holiday seems to evoke memories for me. This approaching Christmas caused me to remember an event that happened years ago when I was a grunt in Vietnam.

I was an 11- Charlie, which stood for infantry mortar man. The specialty was no safer than being an 11- Bravo, which stood for infantry foot soldier. We called them 11- Bullet stoppers.

When we changed areas of operation from the highlands to flat plains, we got rid of our 81 mm mortar because it was too heavy to hump. Since I was already used to carrying a twenty-three pound base plate our platoon sergeant chose me to carry the twenty-six pound M-60 machinegun instead.

The gun was a weapon I had never even held in my hands, much less shot. We were in a hot area of operation and everyone expected contact. In a clearing, waiting for resupply, I extended the bipod of the gun and pointed it toward the tree line. I was admiring my handiwork when a voice from behind interrupted my thoughts.

“Better lower the bipod. In a firefight, you want as low to the ground as you can get.”

I turned to see a trooper named Denny. He was white, but had dark black hair and drooping handlebar moustache. He was from Michigan, as were many of my fellow boonie rats. Denny was a veteran of the recent Cambodian campaign and had participated in many firefights with the elusive enemy of darkness.

I lowered the bipod and thanked Denny for his sage advice. Later that night, moans of someone suffering horribly awoke me. It was Denny.

“He has malaria,” First Sergeant told me. “Medevac won’t come for him till his temperature reaches a sustained one-oh-four.”

One-oh-four was a number someone in the rear had come up with to prevent troopers from faking illnesses. The problem was, when a sky trooper’s temperature reached a sustained one-oh-four, he was already almost dead.

Later that night, a chopper carried Denny away, and everyone tried to forget that we had ever known him. It was November, although it seemed more like summer in tropical Vietnam. Later that month I left the jungle for good. A college graduate, I got transferred to help in the rear as a clerk-typist. Seems they needed a typist more than a gunner.

When Christmas neared, the company sergeant asked if I wanted to see the Bob Hope Christmas show. The gig required spending a night on a forward firebase and none of my fellow clerks wanted to chance being that close to potential combat. Fresh out of the jungle anyway, I said yes.

The night on the forward firebase went without incident, except that a reporter for Newsweek later wrote that we violated the Christmas truce when everyone on the firebase opened fire for what we called the “mad minute.”

Next day we took a Chinook helicopter to the hospital in Bien Hoa to see Bob Hope. It was there that I saw Denny again, wandering around the grounds in pajamas and a robe. He did not recognize me.

Denny reminded me of Jack Nicholson in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest—after his full frontal lobotomy, that is.

I didn’t have a good seat and didn’t see much of the show. It mattered little because I was thinking of other things—Denny and the masses of other brain and soul-damaged soldiers wandering like wraiths across the grounds of the sprawling hospital.

That Christmas night, I watched the sunset from the back of a departing Chinook, and considered my own mortality.