Chickenhawk: Back in the World - Life After Vietnam

Made it to a sidewalk cafe as if it were a desperate mission. Sucked down whiskey, shaking. Four whiskies later, not shaking. Back to normal, telling funny stories. “Man,” I said, “Don’t know what that was all about, but I’m feeling fine now.” I smiled. Ray and his wife looked relieved.

I needed to snap out of this feeling of depression. I took a Hiller out by myself one Saturday. I flew the riverbed alone, swooping from cliff tops to the valley floor and up to the other side. I felt okay in my helicopter.

I autorotated into the same place my student and I had the near collision. Picked up to a high hover and floated slowly across a grassy ravine to a field, savoring the magic of levitation. No other helicopters were in sight. I put the toe of the left skid on top of a fence post and twirled around it. I practiced keeping the tail into the wind, hard to do smoothly. I turned around and saw a deer, a stag, bounding two hundred yards away, running to the tree line.

Dump nose and pursue. Intercept deer crossing the last clearing before the trees.

Deer veers away, leaping rocks, bushes, and ditches—eyes wide. Fly beside the running deer, alone, unaware of the helicopter strapped to me. Slide in front, facing the deer.

Deer turns. I block.

Deer stops for second, stares at the clamorous, hideous thing chasing it; stumbles backward, spins around to make an escape. No good. I’m there, too.

Deer sags, legs spread out. Chest heaves. Tongue hangs out from exhaustion. I back away, inviting it to run again.

C’mon, run! You asshole!

Deer stares, eyes glazed, immobile.

I have beaten this deer.

I’d been at Wolters for over a year. Coming into the main heliport with my last student of the day, I took the controls after the student came to a hover at the landing pad, because of the traffic. Hundreds of helicopters hovering to their parking spots made hundreds of rotor-wash storms, so the helicopters were tricky to control. The machine wanted to skitter off with every gust. My hands and feet moved the controls automatically, compensating. The Hiller hovered between spinning rotors, jittery, like a thoroughbred being led through a crowd.

Almost to the parking slot, I feel the helicopter tilt backward and immediately push the cyclic forward. Wrong. Not tilting back. I can see that, but it still feels like we’re tilting back. I force myself to concentrate, ignore the feeling, fly reality. But the feeling is unshakable. Which is real? Bad time to experiment with relativity, so I tell the student “You got it” as I hover into the parking spot. Student says, “I got it.” Good student. Figures asshole IP is fucking with him again; probably wondering if IP will cut the power while he tries to park. Student sets the Hiller down like a pro.

Drive to the flight surgeon after leaving the student (he got an excellent grade), still dizzy. Flight surgeon impressed. No flying. They decided to watch me for a month to see if I got dizzy again. The flight commander put me in charge of our pickup truck. I drove it out to the stage fields and helped in the control towers, keeping track of the ships as they checked in, made coffee. Gofer work. I felt horrible. No flying? That’s why I joined the Army. I went to the flight surgeon. Told him I felt great, sleeping like a fucking log. He believed me. I was back in the air two weeks after I was grounded.

Two months later it happened again. This time I was cruising straight and level, felt the ship rolling when it was not. My student landed, never knowing his IP was fucked up. This time I was grounded until they could find out what was wrong.

What is wrong? shrink asks. Dunno. Have a real hard time sleeping. Don’t sleep.

“Do you have dreams?”

“Patience asks if I’m dreaming when I jump up all night. I dream, but I can’t remember them—except one. But I’m never able to tell her this dream. I tell her I don’t dream anything.”

“What’s it about?” shrink asks.

“I’m not sure where I am, but every morning a truck comes—”

“What truck?”

“A truck loaded with dead babies.”

“You’ve seen this—in Vietnam?”

“No. I’ve seen lots of dead babies, but not loaded in trucks.”

“Continue, please.”

“The truck comes. I have to open the back door; I know what’s out there, but I still go to the door. It’s always the same. The driver backs the truck to the door and says, ‘How many do you want?’ He points to the pile of dead babies. I always gag at the sight. They all look dead, but then I see an eyelid blink in the pile, then another.”

“That’s it?”

Feeling bad; seeing it. “No. I always answer, Two hundred pounds, Jake.’ I laugh when I say it. Jake picks up a pitchfork and stabs it into the pile and drops a couple of corpses on a big scale. ‘Nearly ten pounds a head,’ he says. Inside my head, I’m yelling for him to stop, that the babies aren’t dead, but Jake just keeps loading the scale. Each time he stabs a kid, it squirms on the fork, but Jake doesn’t notice.”

Shrink watches me awhile. “That’s the end?”

“Yes.”

“What do you think the dream means?”