Once, late one night when Bob and I had been drinking a bit more than was even usual for us, I tried to sound him out on what the experience of serious fire fight combat had been like for him. I may make him seem like a constant pub brawl waiting to happen, or some demented tropically lean Santa Claus on permanent walkabout—but he was a cultured man too. He read Graham Greene and Bonhoeffer. He knew Sibelius. He answered me this way. “As you probably know now, a helicopter is most vulnerable when taking off. Landing, you have a choice about. In the air and up to speed, even some worry-worthy artillery doesn’t hold sway. Evasion and escape. If you can’t fly a chopper, don’t. Once I was taking off from an extraction point, and everything was pretty good. Everyone accounted for, no blood on the metal…one of the best scenarios I’d had. Then out of nowhere, this guy appears and is about to fling a grenade at us. I shot him clean through the head with a service automatic. Pure reaction shot out the window. Dead center hit. Then I lifted off and banked hard left home. “I don’t recommend people try to take off a copter while shooting out a window. In that moment, nothing was easier. I don’t remember aiming. A Colt .45. Was that man I killed a Vietcong soldier? Probably not, not really. I think he was a 35 year-old rural peasant farmer who thought he was protecting his family and homeland. Charlie was everywhere and nowhere. But he had a grenade in his hand and I smattered the brain meat out of his skull just as easily as I’m talking to you. Sometimes, the deeper stress and trauma is that we don’t feel bad for the evil we do. That’s what we really have to live with down the years. He wasn’t going to blow up my helicopter. I got everyone home safe. I was the pilot, the command position. In another world, we’d have drunk some kind of rice wine together and named our children after each other. I shot off his forehead and rotored up. Thats what it was like.
Posted on: Sat, 10 Jan 2015 19:15:02 +0000
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